randomwalks/dj

I don't think I've ever seen as unique a Lego creation as this "eco punk" mobile town, created by Dave DeGobbi. (Click for a bigger pic!)

Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes.

Also check out Dave's Goliath airship creation. [via the ever-awesome Brothers Brick]

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Originally posted by John Baichtal from MAKE Magazine, on February 20, 2010 4:05 PM

February 16, 2010 -- The entire cast of performers, including Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Cornelius, Yuka Honda, Paul Simon, Scissor Sisters, Justin Bond, Bette Midler, Mark Ronson, and Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, sings "Give Peace a Chance" as part of We Are Plastic Ono Band at the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York.

View full set. Happy 77th birthday, Yoko!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kathryn yu dot com, on February 20, 2010 3:36 PM

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on February 20, 2010 1:54 PM

...at Twin Peaks Props!

Originally posted by Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks Archive, on February 20, 2010 5:49 AM

I'd like to announce the public debut of a service I've been working on. Among other things, it provides "cloud hosting" for web applications written in Ur/Web, a domain-specific functional language for "Web 2.0 programming."

http://www.graftid.com/

This service (called Graftid) also enables communities of developers to work together to build tools that non-programmers can use to build customized web sites quickly. Anyone can upload a site-generator GUI, which is implemented in Ur/Web and also generates Ur/Web code, based on what a user enters into the GUI. Everything is statically-typed, and it's possible to use combinators to minimize the cost of building a new GUI. Every GUI inherits a platform for automatic deployment of applications, without the need to write a line of code that has a server-side side effect.

I'm looking for curious folks who might like to put this platform through its paces, finding bugs, security-oriented and otherwise. I hope that many LtU readers will find this a very pleasant platform for building buzzword-compliant web apps, without the need to learn much about the buzzwords and their associated technologies. :)

I also have a related question that I thought I'd include with this post: We're all used to encapsulation for examples like data structures: a class or module "owns" a representation, and the representation may only be accessed by going through the class or module's published interface. Ur/Web extends this facility to let you code a module that owns a cookie, a database table, a subtree of the client-side DOM for a particular page rendering, etc.. Think "Facebook apps" with static enforcement of which app may touch which resource, but without the need for any dynamic enforcement, and with the possibility for running all the apps on the same server; we just combine first-class web app pieces with standard encapsulation techniques. Does anyone know of any other systems that allow this? Has the desirability of this facility been articulated somewhere?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog, on February 20, 2010 5:33 AM

It would be easy to read this and feel superior, but don't.

Imagine you knew nothing about computers and somehone handed you a Macintosh and told you to figure it out.

How long would it take you to figure out what each of the applications did, or even what an application is, and how they differ and how they're similar.

Suppose you found your way all the way to WordPress, think about how many layers of menus and user interfaces you had to master just to get there.

There's the menubar at the top of the screen. The dock at the bottom of the screen. Then, when you launch the web browser, there's a new menu at the top of the screen (and did you notice or did you just think it was the same menu). Then when you get to WordPress, it has its own menu at the top of its screen. But above that menu there are things you click that kind of act like menus that take you away (toolbar icons). WordPress has several kinds of menus. The one running across the top of its screen and the one running down the left.

Okay, someone told you to click OK when the machine asks you to install new software. You have to enter your special password to get it to do that. But don't click OK when you're at a web site or in an email. How do you know which you're in?

And icons. Sometimes you click them once and sometimes you click them twice.

You don't see all of these layers of complexity either because you were around when each one came online (I was) or you just forgot what it was like to be presented with it for the first time. I have no idea what it was like to be a child who had these things since before they can remember, but I know a few undergrads at NYU who I'm going to ask about this.

My mother, on the other hand, has been using computers since before they were born, she started with the Mac in 1985 or so, but like someone who learned to speak another language as a child, she sees the bewildering complexity of our language whenever she does things that we take for granted.

You might say don't worry, her generation won't be here much longer, but that's my mom you're talking about. And further, how much effort are we wasting pushing around all these unnecessary concepts? Too much.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on February 20, 2010 4:47 AM

Shared by sippey
Dave's getting at something here, even if he did overstate his case with the FreshAir example. The reason that show was interesting was precisely because he had all the resources behind him to learn / write / publish about healthcare. Here's the challenge with enabling "experts" -- sometimes (most times?) those experts have no idea how to craft a compelling story.

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on.

The meeting was supposed to follow the BloggerCon rules of moderation, but most people don't know about these, so it takes a while before it feels normal. I had that experience trying to boot up BloggerCon-style meetings in Nashville and Palo Alto. If the people don't know how it works, it just doesn't work.

So about half-way through the meeting I stopped moderating and let the discussion go where it would naturally go. And I learned something from this. I guess that's not surprising.

In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model. It's pretty inhuman, because the people who do the generating are sometimes "experts" who invest their whole lives in understanding stuff, and then want to share it with others because that's what humans like to do, even if they aren't being paid. Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so!

Okay, everyone says NY is where the future is. I'm afraid this might become hype just like the story you hear about Silicon Valley. It's a way of saying the rest of the world doesn't count. Of course people like to think that they live in the one place that makes a difference, it's simpler that way. The world is so complex, who wouldn't want it to be simpler. But who would be happy if they thought the center of the world was somewhere else? So the battle is constant. And for a while people believed the center was in Silicon Valley. I think the worst thing in the world is to live in the center. There's no where to go but down from there. Upside is better. So I choose to think where I live is somewhere off-center. It's also more interesting.

So when the New York conversation drifts, it doesn't end up where the Silicon Valley conversation ends. I guess this is no surprise, right? Where it ends up is with the (forgive me I don't know the terminology) the guy writing the story that informs everyone else. Who is everyone else? It's the hamsters again! This time the hamsters, instead of generating content, are generating revenue! They're clicking on the tip jar, causing micropayments to flow to the author (and his or her editors) so they can earn a living while informing all the other hamsters who are happily paying for all this good stuff. But what happens if the knowledge that everyone wants isn't in the reporters' heads but rather resides with the hamsters? What then?

In the past there was a simple answer. No sale. The information just doesn't get there. But that answer is no longer good enough.

Two cases in point. One, the prototype -- This American Life did a special called Giant Pool of Money -- which should win a Pulitzer for explaining the financial crisis of 2008 in terms anyone with a mind could understand. Everyone who heard it probably remembers exactly where they were when they did. I was walking on Marin Ave in Berkeley. It was great. Before I heard it I had no clue what the financial crisis was about. After hearing it, I got it. And everyone agrees -- we need more of this. But, I found out last night, much to my chagrin, that it took months to produce this episode. And there's the rub, and why the people who are invested in the NY-based system are so enamored of this example, because it proves that You Need Us. Without heavily and expensively produced content, they say, you won't be informed.

So I provide a counter-example. One that fits my model, which I proudly think of as being neither Silicon Valley-centered or New York-centered. I (of course) think my model is reality-centered. (Yes, I am arrogant, I cop to it.)

The counter-example is this. A fantastic FreshAir episode, one hour in duration, recorded live, with almost no production, that completely explained the options for universal health care in the US just as the debate was beginning. It was timely, complete, wonderful and super-inexpensive. Why? Because an individual did all the work. It was paid for by a publisher of course, and he is a professional writer, so while it was expensive, it's part of a reservoir of value that thinkers on both coasts tend to ignore, and in doing so, I think -- miss where the answer is going to come from. The question is -- how will we satisfy the enormous thirst people have for information when the economics of information no longer support vast budgets, or vast amounts of time, to produce expensive wonderful programming like Pool of Money. The answer: From the sources. The people who know what's up.

Sure, This American Life produced something sexier, with great production value, and FreshAir is a talk show. But it was still riveting. I remember where I was when I listened to it (driving from Santa Cruz between Los Gatos and Fremont). I found, last night, when explaining it, I could name each of the models the author described, and it's been six months since the program aired. It obviously made as much of an impression as Pool of Money did.

So the moral of the story is that neither coast has the answer, but the answer is out there all the same. Let's not gravitate to an assumption that the cursor has moved 3000 miles to the east and bring all our sloppy thinking habits with us. We have minds, let's use them, and our minds have information, and let's distribute it, to whoever wants it, no matter where it comes from.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on February 19, 2010 11:08 PM

Shared by waggish
Coetzee's best in a while.

We have been here before, albeit in different forms. Almost without exception, Coetzee's work from Elizabeth Costello on has been concerned with the role of authors and authorship, not only of fiction but of memoirs and essays. He has repeatedly presented fictional characters giving speeches, opinions, or recollections that have repeatedly been confused as the opinions of the real Coetzee. Richard Crary's piece on Diary of a Bad Year is one of the best attempts to read these polemics and opinions with respect to their fictional context, but most critics seem to still be taking Coetzee's books at face value.

Summertime is in many ways the culmination of this project of Coetzee's, and the most explicit depiction of the ambiguities and metafictional techniques he is using. It also makes clear that the series extends back before Elizabeth Costello to the two "memoirs" preceding it. In light of that, there is an apparent progression (links are to my earlier reviews):

1. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997): Third-person "memoir" of a child with history similar to Coetzee's, filed as "Coetzee biography" by the Library of Congress.
2. Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002): Third-person "memoir" of a young adult with history similar to Coetzee's, not classified as any sort of biography.
3. Elizabeth Costello (2003): Fictional writer Costello presents opinions that share some similarity to what is known of Coetzee (e.g., both are vegetarians).
4. Slow Man (2005): Costello invades life of injured photographer Paul Rayment, who shares some characteristics with Coetzee (e.g., biker, Australian resident). Costello claims she is his author.
5. Diary of a Bad Year (2007): Coetzee doppelganger "J.C." writes many political opinions while involved in a soap operaish plot with his amanuensis.
6. Summertime (2009): Biographer interviews five people for a book he is writing about the recently deceased John Coetzee, who has written all the books of the real Coetzee up until his death.

[I am withholding judgment on whether Disgrace (1999) fits into this sequence. It is problematic. I will say that I prefer Summertime to it, evidently putting me into a small minority, though I suspect that many, many others will enjoy Summertime more, as I did.]

Coetzee does not append any description to the first two books (my US copy of Boyhood has "A Memoir" on the cover but nowhere else, so I am not taking it as canon), while he explicitly declares the subsequent books to be "Fiction." The first hint of something wrong occurs in Youth, which omits all mention of the real Coetzee's marriage during the time it covers. From there on, no double for Coetzee appears until Diary, but the host of variations from the real Coetzee (different birth year, never married, no children) made the distinction apparent. Likewise in Summertime: unmarried, childless. There is little to suggest that any of the people in Summertime are real or, in the case of his family, that they correlate to their real-life counterparts.

So the Coetzee of Summertime matches up with J.C. in Bad Year, and his childhood bears some resemblance to that described in the first two "memoirs," but with small, notable differences, the most obvious being that cousin Agnes in Youth has become Margot in Summertime, though both have the Coetzee-surrogate falling in love with her as a child. Coetzee would never make such a name-change spuriously, and so I must assume that there is no strict continuity here between the Coetzee surrogate across books.

Here the distinctions are even more explicit, as during the 1970s, the fictional Coetzee is unmarried and has several love affairs recounted by the interviewees. And, uh, he's dead. So at once we have the most evident coincidence with Coetzee's public life with the greatest variation from his private life. Call him "Bizarro Coetzee." And we have five people talking about this Bizarro Coetzee to our unnamed biographer, bookended by oblique fragments from Bizarro Coetzee's notebooks that date (mostly, at least) from the 1970s. The opening fragments are in the possession of the biographer, as he references them; the ending fragments, possibly not.

The biographer is looking for the man behind the books. None of the five people are particularly interested in how the Bizarro Coetzee (from here on out, just "Coetzee") they knew relates to his books, and they express varying degrees of irritation at what they perceive to be the irrelevance of the biographer's intentions. Each of them has their own agenda:

1. Julia: A rather self-centered and self-willed free spirit who cheated on her husband with the hapless and dispassionate Coetzee in the early 70s when she was still a naive housewife, and since then has thought little of Coetzee (in both senses of the word).
2. Margot: The aforementioned cousin who had a very close relationship with Coetzee while growing up, maybe enough to call love.
3. Adriana: A Brazilian immigrant and dance instructor whose daughter was taught by Coetzee in high school the mid-70s. Coetzee falls in love with her and does not let go. Awkwardness ensues. Adriana detests him.
4. Martin: A supercilious and trite colleague of Coetzee's from his university teaching days.
5. Sophie: An archetypal self-righteous postcolonial academic who co-taught with Coetzee at the university and thinks him not radical enough.

With the exception of Margot, none of the subjects come off particularly well (there are hints that some of them, especially Adriana, are not telling the whole truth), but neither does Coetzee, who is ridiculed by them as a bore, a nerd, a pervert, and a prig at various times. Yet the most ridiculous figure in all of the sections is the biographer himself (for it must be a man). He is manipulative and ignorant. He gets simple facts about South African history wrong, misquotes Beckett, puts words into the mouths of his interviewees, and is indifferent to anything outside of the quarry he is chasing. That quarry is the romantic image he has of Coetzee as a solitary pedant more interested in books than in people. It is not that there is no truth to this image or that it is not compelling, but it is a wild distortion, and the biographer is rather bad at it.

The keystone is the section with Coetzee's cousin Margot, which is not a straight interview, but a transcript of the biographer reading his draft back to Margot with Margot's interruptions. Margot's reaction is one of horror as she hears what the biographer has embellished, invented, and distorted of what she told him earlier; it's no wonder she wants to go back over it again at the end of the transcript. And the draft itself is the most sustained piece of intentionally bad writing Coetzee has ever done. His account of Margot's story is filled with cliched eroticism (see page 137 for a cringeworthy example), purple passages clumsily reaching to the sublime, and tacky interpolations of native Afrikaans words to give a sense of local color. Other cheap biographical tropes are present by the dozen, and by the end the biographer has replaced the selfish, would-be bohemian Julia as the most loathsome character in the book. The link between the two is their single-minded exploitation of others. Julia uses Coetzee in her story of finding herself just as cravenly as the biographer is using his subjects to "find" the Coetzee he already has decided exists.

There are some recurrent themes, however, the dominant one of Coetzee being ill at ease and repressed around most everyone. Julia is too narcissistic to link this repression to Apartheid, while Sophie is too quick to do so, but the fictional Coetzee is no doubt as uncomfortable revealing himself as our real Coetzee appears to be in writing these books, though obviously for different reasons (only one is a famous writer who has won the Nobel prize). And he does reveal himself through his solitary studies: Schubert, Plato, the Hottentot language. In the unreliable words of the biographer, he claims to have learned Hottentot to "speak with the dead. Who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence." This is, of course, exactly what the biographer is not doing; the voices of the living, including his own, drown out those of the dead throughout the book.

So we are left only with the notebooks at the beginning and end. They do not bolster the biographer's image of Coetzee. They show engagement: with history, with politics, with his family and particularly his father. (These are subjects the biographer has mostly avoided in favor of more tawdry gossip and neat conclusions.) Coetzee is far more aware than the interviewees have depicted him, though no less tentative. The last entry is an agonizing depiction of Coetzee's father and his cancerous illness, and it ends with a question mark, a moment of decision that cuts off before the decision is made. Since this notebook is still buried in layers of fictionality, there is no truth as to what happened next, only a fragment. The way I read it, Coetzee is attempting to speak to the living as one might try to speak to the dead, or perhaps to an alien species.

(And even in the notebooks, the elisions and distortions are obvious, particularly in the latter notebooks, where the high-minded prose sits uneasily next to the meek and clumsy Coetzee of the interviews, and the events recounted by the subjects are only alluded to.)

This is not a charitable interpretation, for the whole book has shown the pitfalls of his way, and he deserves no credit for an approach that seems to have been instilled in him long before he had a choice in the matter. But the mixture of raw (albeit untrustworthy) emotion with delicate confusion and indeterminacy has an accumulating impact, as you're challenged to pull the tatters of Real Life from the mess of disingenuous versions proffered by the book's characters, you fail to do so, and you are left with a shifting moire of relationships and human weaknesses that resists authentication. And yet there is great feeling in this ambiguous moire, even if it can't be determined how valid or real any of it is. Unlike so much of Coetzee's controlled work, Summertime exudes passion and warmth even when the characters themselves do not. It is his sunniest book, as though the layers of uncertainty have set free an expressive emotive power that would have been too manipulative to use in his earlier fiction.

The worth of Summertime is in portraying that moire of partial voices without the typically clinical, scientific condescension that accompanies it in, for instance, the myriad works of relativism and anti-foundationalism that wave away all certainties with a flourish and discount any meaning to them. Instead there is great feeling, albeit feeling which must be questioned and which is neither definitely true nor definitely false. Summertime leaves the door open.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waggish, on February 19, 2010 11:06 PM

Shared by sippey
"I had no idea what we were in for. Honestly, none of us did."

The chef recalls the brief but influential time he spent working in Ferran Adria's kitchen.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com, on February 19, 2010 11:02 PM

Matt sez, "With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop's crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I'd take an opportunity to look at the good D&D has done for several writers I know. This is that article. By the way, I've been a D&D player for almost thirty years now, and have been a happier, more productive person for it."

I haven't played since my early 20s (late teens?) but D&D was an enormously positive influence on my life and imagination.

Jay Lake, the author of ten novels including his most recent, Green, told me that D&D became a big part of his life as boarding school student.

"At boarding school, if you're good and fast with homework, and deeply socially and athletically inept otherwise, there's not a lot to do. I'd been to seven schools in nine years on three continents when I hit Choate Rosemary Hall," said Lake. "I possessed the kind of poor social skills that are almost hip today, but were a recipe for meat-grinder misery in the 1970s when too-smart, too-isolated kids didn't have ready access to the kind of virtual retreats we have today in gaming, programming and online life. Geek culture at the teen level didn't exist yet, except as a special class of victimhood. Combine that with a raging case of clinical depression, and I was a disaster waiting to happen."

Dungeons & Dragons provided a constructive way to pass the time for Lake and his friends.

"The alternate worlds and wild imagination of D&D gave me and my fellow misfits an outlet, and we had dozens upon dozens of hours per week to spend on it. Where else were we going to go? We lived in our high school. Think about that for a minute. Six or eight ferociously bright kids-Choate is one of the most academically competitive schools in the nation-with nothing to do but make things up to amuse one another, and D&D providing the framework."

Although those years have since passed, Lake still credited the game with providing a foundation he has built upon as a successful writer.

"Those three years playing D&D at boarding school did more to ground me in storytelling, plot construction, and sheer, raw imaginative throughput than any other single activity of my life. Today I'm a successful fantasy and science fiction novelist with ten novels and over two hundred short stories in print or on the way. I might have gotten to this point by a different path, but it would not have been the same journey,"

Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons (Thanks, Matt!)

Previously:

• Boing Boing: Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D
• Boing Boing: D&D to be reissued by WotC
• Boing Boing: Where are the celebrity D&D TV shows?
• Laptop-controlled projector based D&D table - Boing Boing
• Boing Boing: How to snog in D&D
• Boing Boing: How 'Dungeons' changed the world
• 1974 D&D review - Boing Boing

Originally posted by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, on February 19, 2010 9:29 PM

Github developer Scott Chacon describes their development process:

At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches thier own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

The first question that occurs to me when reading this is, under what conditions would such an approach work? (The second is, do they have a quality assurance department, and if so, how do they plan their work?)

But let’s go back to the first. I can think of a few prerequisites:

1. Your developers must be users of the product. In fact, I think this sort of approach could only work for companies that build tools for developers.
2. Your developers must be able to iterate without relying too much on other members of the team.
3. The business must not have customers who are promised certain features by a certain date. Customers of every software company I’ve ever worked for have requested features that no developer wants to work on, but they pay the bills, so we worked on them anyway.

There are probably a lot more conditions required to make this sort of arrangement work, but those are the ones that immediately leap out at me. The beautiful thing about this approach is that it insures that you get exactly the developers you’d like to have. The people who would not want to work under these conditions are not the ones you’d want anyway, and the developers you would want would leap at the chance to work in this fashion.

Thanks to Ryan Tomayko for the link.

Update: Be sure to read Ryan’s comment below, he adds a lot more details about how things work at GitHub.

Originally posted by Rafe from rc3.org, on February 19, 2010 6:09 PM

Garry Kasparov:

What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on February 19, 2010 4:57 PM

Having attended TED last week, where people spend $6,000 + travel/lodging seemingly in order to watch talks which will be posted online for free, I found myself again wondering just what role conferences and events play. This is not of mere academic interest — Adaptive Path earns a substantial portion of its revenue through its public events, I’ve helped organize professional industry events such as the IA Summit, the IA Institute’s IDEA, and DUX, and I speak at 4-6 events a year.

Given the ascent of the Web, one could have expected conferences to wither, as you can find online much of the information presented at conferences. Why bother traveling all over the country and spending all that money when you can pretty much keep up with any field through online means? Particularly when so many events now share their sessions freely on the Web?

Just the opposite seems to have happened. We’re lousy with conferences. In my industry alone there is UX Week and MX (put on by Adaptive Path), the IA Summit, Interaction from the IxDA, UPA’s annual event, the Design Research Conference, SxSW Interactive, IDEA, and this isn’t including the newer events from overseas such as UX London and UX-LX. In the “Big Think” space, there’s TED, and now Pop!Tech, Lift, and The e.g.. It seems that the internet has made people more aware of these opportunities for gathering, and instead of supplanting them, have made attendance even more desirable.

If it’s not about the content, then it must be about the people attending, right? In the case of TED, that is almost certainly true — many, if not most, of the folks spending $6,000 are able to write it off as a business expense.

About 5 years ago, there was a lot of discussion about unconferences, events with no set agenda beyond a high-level theme, and instead of canned presentations planned ahead of time, the schedule is determined after everyone has arrived, and people lead conversations on specific topics. While the unconference movement still exists, it has not taken over the way that many thought it would. It turns out you need more than just the right people.

While the cliche that “best content happens in the hallways” is largely true of conferences, those conversations require the canned presentations. They provide the seed for the ongoing dialogue. They’re the “social object” around which conversation and community revolve.

What the Web has done is made very clear what kinds of conversations are happening at different events, and if you want to be part of those larger discussions, you know you ought to get there.

I think a lot about how Adaptive Path’s events should evolve… UX Week is the event I’m most involved with, and I want to make sure it stays fresh, lively, and relevant. We continue to tinker with a mix of presentations, workshops, and social events, trying to strike the best balance between inspiration, information, skills-building, and networking. And I wonder what I’m missing, what other elements we should introduce (e.g., design charette’s like Design Engaged, where you get 30-40 people in a room, and have them do/make something.).

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on February 19, 2010 3:21 PM

Shared by Jake Dobkin
Speaking for all the non-NYTimes bloggers, I support this plan!

From Reuters:

Arthur Sulzberger, Janet Robinson, and Martin Nisenholtz of the NYT all took the opportunity of hosting today’s PaidContent conference to talk at length about their paywall plans. Which makes it all the more surprising that their message was so garbled: when they weren’t simply refusing to say anything at all, they were giving three conflicting answers to the same question.

Nisenholtz did say quite clearly that he expected ad revenue to go up rather than down, which implied to me that that paywall was going to be pretty porous. And Sulzberger said that “we are not trying to eliminate ourselves from the digital ecosystem”. But when I asked about specifics, it all got rather messy. It started when I asked whether the NYT’s own blogs would be counted towards the quota, and Nisenholtz replied that “our intention is to keep blogs behind the wall”.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Shake-Up On New York Times Board: Scott Galloway Out, Carolyn Greenspon Nominated
• New York Times's iPad Fight Was Part Of A Larger Print Vs. Digital Civil War
• Who Is The New York Times Hiring To Build Its Paywall?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Silicon Alley Insider, on February 19, 2010 2:40 PM

Perl 5.11.5 comes out tomorrow and Perl 5.12 should be out soon. (Much credit goes to people such as Jesse Vincent and David Golden, to name two, for getting Perl 5 on a regular release cycle.) I've long promised to write about the Perl 5 support and deprecation policy and how that affects users.

Perl 5.10.1 was, by definition, a minor revision. Perl 5.12 is a major revision. The nominal difference is which component of the version number increases. By intent, users of 5.10 (actually 5.10.0, but often abbreviated) should be able to upgrade that installation in place to any subsequent minor release in the 5.10 family. The upgrade isn't always completely transparent, but the intent is that, modulo bugfixes, it should be.

When 5.10.0 came out, work started on a new Perl 5 release family called 5.11 (that's not entirely true, but it's sufficiently true for this explanation). This is the unstable series intended for development and testing which will become 5.12 in the next couple of months. You are welcome to download, configure, build, test, and even install 5.11, but you should be comfortable without support from p5p for upgrades and changes.

The monthly releases in the 5.11 (and soon, the 5.13) series represent points of stability and review so that the Perl 5 developers can concentrate on the quality of what will become 5.12.0.

When 5.12.0 comes out, you will notices changes from 5.10.0 in terms of new features, removed features, and upgrades to the standard library. While most code should work unmodified with 5.12.0 as it did with 5.10.0, some modules will need updates. You likely also have to recompile any modules with XS components.

In subsequent entries, I'll write more about the implications of all of this, when you should upgrade, how deprecations and changes work, and the binary compatibility policies of Perl 5.

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog, on February 19, 2010 12:15 PM

This man does not like his apartment complex. There are RUDE PEOPLE in the building, and CARS TOWED JUST BECAUSE and THE MAINTENANCE people come in with no warning. But most importantly:

MOLE
I have mole growing around my bat tub, the maintenance told me it's not mole and just cocked it well it came back IT'S MOLE!

For the past two days, Steve has been treated to frequent faux-exasperated expostulations from my corner:

"Well, hell. IT'S MOLE."

"Take my word for it, IT'S MOLE."

"IT'S MOLE, okay, it's fucking MOLE."

Oddly, he seems to like it. Just before bed last night, I broke into his reverie. "For fuck's sake!" I said angrily. "Guess what."

He looked up, startled and concerned. I glared. He stared. Then an expression of great joy lit up his face. "It's mole!" he exclaimed. "Yes!" I said. "It's mole!"

Do you think he'll cock it?

Originally posted by redfox from Adventures in the Pointless Forest, on February 19, 2010 11:41 AM

What an exhausting week! I’m about to get the hell away from the Internet, but these are the things you should have read today:

• Katie Baker-Bakes on Week One of the Winter Olympics

• Dan Kois’ second installment of “Church”

• Matthew Gallaway’s absolutely gorgeous “In The Weeds”

• The legal column, on diversity in our judiciary system

• Scocca and Sicha on Sally Quinn

• And this bit of poetry, which makes the post to which it is attached seem even less worthy than it was when it went up.

And that should hold you! Have a great weekend. See you at the Tumblr reading tonight!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on February 19, 2010 11:34 AM

Angela West:

They called on Supermac and Aldus, but were turned away at both, a move that Aldus would come to seriously regret.

Shortly after, the Knoll brothers struck gold when they won over Adobe management with their product, and formed a licensing partnership with Adobe that was to launch their software and Adobe into the stratosphere.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on February 19, 2010 10:47 AM

On Saturday, February 20, in Union, Missouri, a unique and amazing collection of baseball memorabilia will be auctioned. Baseball fan Clara Schmitt Rothmeier, who passed away last June, created several baseball-themed quilts, the most famous of which, a piece called “My Favorite Baseball Stars,” was exhibited by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1959-1960. It came to my attention as part of the 2003 American Folk Art Museum exhibit, “A Perfect Game,” which I reviewed at Futility Infielder. This is what I wrote at the time:

One of the most prominent pieces of the exhibit is a 7′ x7′ quilt called “My Favorite Baseball Stars,” created by Clara Schmitt Rothmeier, the daughter of a minor league ballplayer. (This photo of the quilt and the other photos I link to for this article were generously provided by Susan Flamm of the AFAM for the purposes of this review). Over a ten-year period from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties, Rothmeier drew pictures of her favorite players, traced them onto fabric, appliquéd and embroidered each one, then sent them to the players for their autographs. Once a panel was returned, she would add it to her quilt, embroidering the signature as well. Midway into the project, she added a border of cloth baseballs, each featuring another signature that she’d collected. The finished quilt contains forty-four panels and about three hundred autographed balls. There are some heavy hitters among those portrayed: Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Robin Roberts, Al Kaline, and a sleeveless Ted Kluszewski. Among the signed and embroidered balls are even more legends: Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Jimmie Foxx, Frankie Frisch, Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, “Cool Papa” Bell, Bob Gibson, and Sandy Koufax. Yeah, some of those guys could play ball.

Here’s Rothmeier’s bio on the auction site, along with links to a few of the other quilts which are up for auction:

Born in 1931, hailing from Japan, Missouri, Clara Schmitt Rothmeier was certainly no stranger to the diamond.

Clara was an accomplished baseball player as well as a quiltmaker. Her father played minor league ball in the Pittsburgh organization, and her five brothers and four sisters had all played on traveling baseball and softball teams. Clara herself played first base for a traveling softball team from Springfield, Illinois. While on the road, she started sewing to keep busy. Her “My Favorite Baseball Stars” quilt took more than 10 years to complete, has 340 actual autographs, and was exhibited in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in 1959-1960.

She has also made quilts commemorating the 1951 and 1956 St. Louis Cardinals (her favorite club) [here and here], the major league teams of 1948, and Jackie Robinson’s 1955 World Champion Dodgers [here], and the “Major League Baseball Stars” quilt [here] containing 537 actual autographs.

Also via the auction site, here’s a bit about her most famous quilt’s trip to Cooperstown:

This quilt graced the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY from 1959-1960. Clara took the quilt to the offices of J. Taylor Spink, editor of the Sporting News in St. Louis to see if she could have a picture of the completed quilt put in the paper so that those who had contributed their names would be able to see the finished quilt.

The picture of the quilt, and Rothmeier and Spink, ran in the Sporting News in March of 1959. Sid Keener, director of the Hall of Fame, saw the picture and made arrangements with Rothmeier to have the quilt displayed in Cooperstown, where it was on public view for almost one year.

The president of the Hall of Fame invited her to go to Cooperstown to see it on display, and arranged for her to see the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs play at Doubleday Field. “After the game there was a tea party where I met the entire Cubs team including Ron Santo,” Clara adds, unable to restrain her obvious love for the game. “Nobody could throw it like him!”

In addition to meeting the Cubs, Clara was able to meet many other baseball greats because of her exposure at the Hall of Fame. One such player was former Yankee great Joe DiMaggio. “I loved Joe DiMaggio the moment I met him,” said Clara. “He got a lot of autographs for me, and interviewed me on his Fan in the Stands show. When he asked me if I’d do it, I was really unsure about it, and told him I wouldn’t know what to say. He said, ‘That’s okay, nobody listens to me anyway.’ Talking with him you felt like you’d known him all your life.”

A Ron Santo fan! Also up for auction besides the quilts are autographed pictures, autographed baseballs and other memorabilia, and 10,000 baseball cards. I imagine this stuff will fetch a pretty penny — according to one of Rothmeier’s nephews, the main attraction has been valued at “anywhere from $10,000 to six figures” — and am hopeful some high roller will step in and purchase the quilts, then loan or donate them to the Hall of Fame for exhibition so that they can be shared with the widest audience possible. This stuff is simply too cool and too unique to not to be shared.

Originally posted by Jay Jaffe from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on February 19, 2010 9:53 AM

This is a cartoon of Batman responding to the Bat Signal. Apparently he's a soccer (football) fan. Who knew? I always pinned him as more of a yacht racing kind of superhero. Or is that Thomas Crown? Steal me a Picasso! Even The Dark Knight deserves an evening off [ramblingsofamadman] Thanks to Greg, who once hit Batman with a bottle rocket and burnt a hole in his cape. Oh you are so bad!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome, on February 19, 2010 9:30 AM

It is indeed difficult to assign an accurate taxonomy to the many costumes worn by Lady Gaga, but I feel like this is an admirable effort: "By their very nature, the garments defied description. But here's an attempt to encapsulate three of them: Muppet Wonder Woman; Joan Collins Jedi Nun; Jellyfish bride humidity disaster area."

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on February 19, 2010 7:20 AM

Everyone’s talking about Adrian Gonzalez as the first baseman that everyone will be chasing this summer, once the Padres finally decide to make him available for bidding. However, with the recent rumblings of the Rays interest in Russell Branyan, I have to think that Carlos Pena is more likely to be the big power hitter getting moved at the deadline.

The Rays are always planning ahead. Branyan is a very similar player to Pena, with all the same strengths and weaknesses (plus one additional weakness – a herniated disc in his back). While he could certainly split time with Pat Burrell at DH, I have to think that the Rays are looking to give themselves the flexibility to move Pena this summer.

If they fall out of the race, it’s a lock he’s getting moved. Headed towards free agency and turning 32 in May, Pena is not the kind of player that Tampa Bay will be paying full market value for. They don’t have the payroll to pay aging sluggers for their decline years.

However, I’d suggest that they may move Pena this summer even if they’re contending, especially if they add Branyan to the fold. If they’re convinced that Branyan is healthy, a platoon with him and Willy Aybar at first base is not a huge step back from what Pena provides. The combination of cost savings and the ability to get value back for him may prove too enticing to pass up, because if they keep Pena until the end of the year, they’re likely to have to let him leave for nothing.

Due to how arbitration and free agency have diverged the last few years, it will be almost impossible for the Rays to offer Pena arbitration, the necessary step to receiving draft pick compensation for a free agent that signs elsewhere. Pena would be able to take his HR and RBI numbers in front of an arbiter and ask for $15 to $20 million, easy. Yet, given how the market has shifted, he won’t be able to come near that AAV as a free agent. The Rays can’t take the risk that he accepts and eats up 30% of their payroll.

So, the Rays face a choice. Deal Pena this summer for value, or let let him leave as a free agent without compensation. As long as he’s still hitting bombs and driving in runs, it’s going to be hard for them to not listen to offers, especially if they have a suitable replacement in house.

If the Rays sign Branyan, I’d suggest it’s the first step towards Pena being traded this summer.

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on February 19, 2010 7:00 AM

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

The prospect of an always-on, portable and discreet e-lottery ticket in your pocket may thrill some and horrify others, but as far as Apple is concerned it looks like it's A-OK for the App Store. We were first tipped to a change in the iPhone developer agreement this past Monday by Joel Comm, the originator of iFart Mobile; the particular adjustment is in section 3.3.17 of the agreement:

3.3.17 Your Application may include promotional sweepstake or contest functionality provided that You are the sole sponsor of the promotion and that You and Your Application comply with any applicable laws.

This opens the door to all sorts of games, prizes and payoffs -- not to mention the possibility of intriguing legal battles, as games of chance and contests are subject to all sorts of differing rules in different jurisdictions. Comm's company's latest app, KaChing Button, will be offering users the chance to win cash prizes in a monthlong sweepstakes that kicks off next Monday. He predicts -- and I concur -- that a massive wave of payoff apps is just over the horizon. I hope all those iPhone developers have excellent lawyers.

[H/T to RegHardware, AppFreak]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liz/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

TUAWApp Store rules changed to allow sweepstakes and contests originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Michael Rose from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on February 19, 2010 6:30 AM

A crowd including Jeffrey Deitch, Alexandra Kerry, Sean MacPherson, Kai Kuhne, Sam Shipley, Jeff Halmos and Marcel Dzama packed into the Swiss Institute Monday night for a screening of Malcolm McLaren's short film Paris, Capital of the XXist Century. Like Walter Benjamin's 1930s opus the Arcades Project, a collection of writings on Paris which his work, Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, is based on, McLaren's film is a collage of French film clips and commercials from the past 100 years, including ads for toilet paper, spreadable cheese, and furniture polish. Here, McLaren tells us via email why he chose those ads and gives us an ambiguous but promising update about his Dior musical. 

When you were working on this project, did you have have in mind what Walter Benjamin would think?

Inadvertently, Walter Benjamin gave me the title of the work, Paris, Capital of the XXist Century. I couldn't call the work just "Paris." It wouldn't describe what the work was truthfully about. This title stops anyone in their tracks from describing it as nostalgia. Nostalgia means for me, simply, 'dead tissue' and that is not exactly what this is about. The only part of the story that Walter Benjamin might have chuckled about is when I gazed at his German original edition of the Arcades Project, its title in Roman numerals, I thought it said, Paris, Capital of the XXIst (21st) Century. 'What a genius, I thought, to have come up with such an audacious title as that, as far back as the 1930s.' I simply had to use it! But on closer inspection much later, I discovered I had misread the title of Benjamin's book. The Roman numerals actually read, Paris, Capital of the XIXth (19th) Century. Nevertheless, I let my title intact.

What do you think the advertisements you used in the film say about this time period?

To answer this question, I must begin by explaining how I started to make the work. I chose from a private archive in Paris, a collection of ads (several hundred, in fact) that firstly spanned the whole of the 20th century. Secondly, I selected those advertisements that I felt spoke to me personally, subjectively, about Paris. Most were made for cinema. Some in the late '60s, '70s, and '80s for TV. Finally, I selected only those that I definitely could make an intervention with and by doing so, become part of its life. This started to change the context and began a new narrative, taking the work into the present. To be precise, I thought of simply being a flaneur, walking through Paris (through its advertising over an entire century -- the last century) thus making Paris, Capital of the XXist Century both have a past by my discovery in the present. And my contemporary urge to make the spirit of Paris both regenerative and transportative. I wanted to bring back those forgotten desires -- build a house you cannot not fall in love in.

Do you have any updates on your Dior musical? You said you were interested in approaching Disney to produce.

This project has stayed in my heart for a long time. And as I struggle with it, and will it into production, I believe it will emerge triumphant.

Photo by PatrickMcMullan.com

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on February 19, 2010 6:19 AM

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on.

The meeting was supposed to follow the BloggerCon rules of moderation, but most people don't know about these, so it takes a while before it feels normal. I had that experience trying to boot up BloggerCon-style meetings in Nashville and Palo Alto. If the people don't know how it works, it just doesn't work.

So about half-way through the meeting I stopped moderating and let the discussion go where it would naturally go. And I learned something from this. I guess that's not surprising.

In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model. It's pretty inhuman, because the people who do the generating are sometimes "experts" who invest their whole lives in understanding stuff, and then want to share it with others because that's what humans like to do, even if they aren't being paid. Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so!

Okay, everyone says NY is where the future is. I'm afraid this might become hype just like the story you hear about Silicon Valley. It's a way of saying the rest of the world doesn't count. Of course people like to think that they live in the one place that makes a difference, it's simpler that way. The world is so complex, who wouldn't want it to be simpler. But who would be happy if they thought the center of the world was somewhere else? So the battle is constant. And for a while people believed the center was in Silicon Valley. I think the worst thing in the world is to live in the center. There's no where to go but down from there. Upside is better. So I choose to think where I live is somewhere off-center. It's also more interesting.

So when the New York conversation drifts, it doesn't end up where the Silicon Valley conversation ends. I guess this is no surprise, right? Where it ends up is with the (forgive me I don't know the terminology) the guy writing the story that informs everyone else. Who is everyone else? It's the hamsters again! This time the hamsters, instead of generating content, are generating revenue! They're clicking on the tip jar, causing micropayments to flow to the author (and his or her editors) so they can earn a living while informing all the other hamsters who are happily paying for all this good stuff. But what happens if the knowledge that everyone wants isn't in the reporters' heads but rather resides with the hamsters? What then?

In the past there was a simple answer. No sale. The information just doesn't get there. But that answer is no longer good enough.

Two cases in point. One, the prototype -- This American Life did a special called Giant Pool of Money -- which should win a Pulitzer for explaining the financial crisis of 2008 in terms anyone with a mind could understand. Everyone who heard it probably remembers exactly where they were when they did. I was walking on Marin Ave in Berkeley. It was great. Before I heard it I had no clue what the financial crisis was about. After hearing it, I got it. And everyone agrees -- we need more of this. But, I found out last night, much to my chagrin, that it took months to produce this episode. And there's the rub, and why the people who are invested in the NY-based system are so enamored of this example, because it proves that You Need Us. Without heavily and expensively produced content, they say, you won't be informed.

So I provide a counter-example. One that fits my model, which I proudly think of as being neither Silicon Valley-centered or New York-centered. I (of course) think my model is reality-centered. (Yes, I am arrogant, I cop to it.)

The counter-example is this. A fantastic FreshAir episode, one hour in duration, recorded live, with almost no production, that completely explained the options for universal health care in the US just as the debate was beginning. It was timely, complete, wonderful and super-inexpensive. Why? Because an individual did all the work. It was paid for by a publisher of course, and he is a professional writer, so while it was expensive, it's part of a reservoir of value that thinkers on both coasts tend to ignore, and in doing so, I think -- miss where the answer is going to come from. The question is -- how will we satisfy the enormous thirst people have for information when the economics of information no longer support vast budgets, or vast amounts of time, to produce expensive wonderful programming like Pool of Money. The answer: From the sources. The people who know what's up.

Sure, This American Life produced something sexier, with great production value, and FreshAir is a talk show. But it was still riveting. I remember where I was when I listened to it (driving from Santa Cruz between Los Gatos and Fremont). I found, last night, when explaining it, I could name each of the models the author described, and it's been six months since the program aired. It obviously made as much of an impression as Pool of Money did.

So the moral of the story is that neither coast has the answer, but the answer is out there all the same. Let's not gravitate to an assumption that the cursor has moved 3000 miles to the east and bring all our sloppy thinking habits with us. We have minds, let's use them, and our minds have information, and let's distribute it, to whoever wants it, no matter where it comes from.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on February 19, 2010 5:44 AM

For me, seeing this picture was just like finding out there’s no Santa Claus.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Mostly Forbidden Zone, on February 19, 2010 5:23 AM

iPhone developer Jonathan "Schwa" Wight offers a great little trick for creating pixel perfect glassy buttons: using the unofficial UIGlassButton class in the simulator to build your art. In his code paste, he shows how to build a button and render it to a PNG, which you can then save to your desktop.

It's a great little trick, and one worth adding to your development arsenal. Be aware that UIGlassButton is a private class, and one that has long since been relegated away from the official SDK development path. Although it continues to work on the Simulator, it's not for use on the iPhone itself or in App Store projects.

Continue reading on to find the code. Don't forget to substitute your own user folder into the code (in my case, "ericasadun") for Jonathan's ("schwa").

// Code to create a "Glass" button and render it to a png on your desktop.
// Run this from the SIMULATOR and change my username to yours.
// Update: This uses a private iPhone SDK. Do not use this code in your shipping app.
// Use it merely to generate the PNG file for you to use in a fake button.

Class theClass = NSClassFromString(@"UIGlassButton");
UIButton *theButton = [[[theClass alloc] initWithFrame:
CGRectMake(10, 10, 120, 44)] autorelease];
[theButton setValue:[UIColor colorWithHue:0.267
saturation:1.000 brightness:0.667 alpha:1.000]
forKey:@"tintColor"];
[self.view addSubview:theButton];

UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(theButton.frame.size);

CGContextRef theContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
[theButton.layer renderInContext:theContext];
UIImage *theImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
NSData *theData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(theImage);
[theData writeToFile:@"/Users/schwa/Desktop/test.png" atomically:NO];

UIGraphicsEndImageContext();



TUAWiPhone devsugar: Create shiny buttons easily originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on February 19, 2010 3:00 AM

There's an interview with Justseeds Member Mary Tremonte over at the Paper Trail Interview series site.

interview with mary mack tremonte
02/18/2010
mary is a zinester, deejay, & artist living in pittsburgh. interview originally posted august 18, 2009.

how did you get involved with zines/d.i.y. publishing?
i am one of many women who came of age in the early 90’s and discovered zines through Sassy magazine! i started ordering zines & tapes & records by ladies after reading reviews in there. a crucial discovery was Action Girl, a newsletter of reviews of zines by ladies, i started making my own zine with my buddy leah early on sophomore year (this was 1993). zines gave me a way to connect to like-minded folks in other places—i had a very active pen pal life all through high school, it really saved me from feeling alone and gave me a big outlet for art and ideas.
Read the rest of the interview at Interview series

the paper trail interview series was launched in january 2006, in conjunction with my now-defunct (as of january 2010) zine distro, learning to leave a paper trail. i came up with a fairly wide-ranging set of ten basic questions about zine creation, zine culture, the creative process, history, advice, & philosophies, & started sending the questions around the zinesters i worked with through the distro. they answered & i posted their thoughts on the distro website.

when i started the interview series, i expected that most folks felt the same way i did about most zine-related things, but the interview responses i got back opened my eyes. i was surprised & impressed with the scope & variety of answers, & it was fascinating to learn about other zinesters’ creative routines & hear their thoughts about zine culture & community. the interviews were popular with folks who ordered from me, & with zinesters that answered the questions. some zinesters used the interviews they did for other projects, in zines, books, & expanded CVs. when i closed down the distro, a lot of people asked what would happen to the interviews. i decided to post the archives here, & to continue sending the interview questions around to zinesters i know.

interviews will be posted on mondays & wednesdays (assuming i can stick to the schedule). when i post an old interview from the archives (i have several dozen),

Originally posted by K C from Just Seeds: Blog, on February 19, 2010 1:39 AM

In an apparent trend set by some of their latest work for the US online media, like the MTV Award Twitter Tracker, data visualization firm Stamen Design recently released an interactive treemap [nbcolympics.com] showing the tweets that deal with the current Winter Olympics in real-time.

A subtle (almost invisible?) sparkline on the top shows some stats and the relative amount of tweets over time. The larger the rectangle, the more tweets have appeared about that topic. Individual rectangles can be selected for more detailed tweets about that specific topic. More information is available on the Stamen blog.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on February 19, 2010 12:46 AM

Two week ago at the the “New Digital Spaces conference at Technoark in Sierre, Switzerland, Matt Jones gave a talk called “people are walking architecture“

(Fabien’s picture of Matt Jones at Technoark)

In his presentation, he introduced the notion of “Mujicomp”, a portmanteau word made of “Muji” (the japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods) and “Computing”. What does it mean?

According to Jones, the idea of “mujicomp” revolved around the notion that ubiquitous computing needs to “become sexy and desirable… able to be appreciated as cultural design objects rather than technology… they should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable in order to be invited into the home“. If designers and engineers want to “make smart cities bottom up with products and not academic ubiquitous computing which are always postponed“, he argued that ubicomp will need some “muji”. And of course, as shown by Jone’s use of the quote from Eliel Saarinen, “always design a thing by considering it in its larger context… a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment“.

Starting from the ground-up can lead to some “almost mujicomp” products he mentioned ranges from energy monitor (Watsson, Wattcher) to more curious devices such as Availabot or Olinda that they develop at BERG. The fon phone is also an example here.

As computing requires not only artifacts but also infrastructures, there’s a need for “mujicompfrastructures”:

“could you create infrastructures with desirable things?
the importance of threshold: how could we look at the spaces where we used our devices in a same way architect look at things? like bottom-up urbanism?
different elements/gray shades between the private and the public: street, sidewalk, pavement, porch, home
this connects to jane jacobs: intervening is not just about creating big infrastructures but sidewalk-scale system that could leak out into the home“

Also in his presentation, Matt talked about the “patchy homebrew equivalent of the nearly-net that would work”, relying on Clay Shirky’s Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data:

“Call the first network “perma-net,” a world where connectivity is like air, where anyone can send or receive data anytime anywhere. Call the second network “nearly-net”, an archipelago of connectivity in an ocean of disconnection. Everyone wants permanet — the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it. The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.“

Why do I blog this? took some time to sort my (messy) notes that highlight interesting aspects of ubicomp evolution and the role of designers in this.

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, on February 19, 2010 12:05 AM

Over at GeekWeek, Luke Thompson's been reviewing various fast food items. Up this week, the Wendy's Premium Fish Fillet.

Lighter, these are not. The piece of fish on my sandwich was dwarfed by the bun (Hey Wendy’s, I think I hear the ghost of Clara Peller: “Where’s the fish?”), and the fish itself was dominated by the, ahem, “Panko.” Wendy’s dense buns are good for burgers loaded with drippy toppings – if they were to bring back some kind of chili cheeseburger, I’d advocate them – but when you’re dealing with an already-breaded product, it’s a bit much. The fish was also a bit too salty for my tastes, though I tend to like less salt than most, but a hint of slight spiciness was welcome. Beyond that, they add lettuce, sauce, and – for forty more cents! – cheese.

This isn't an ironic foodie review ("Oh, look how hip we are appreciating the fast food"), this is from a true fast-food lover. Who else would know so much about Wendy's dense buns?

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on February 18, 2010 8:46 PM

“We wanted to create something that is flexible enough to allow all our brands their full expression whilst uniting them into a coherent user experience.” Rethinking the identity of a site this large is an undertaking I can barely fathom. I also really liked the simplicity of their new icon set, seen above, which supports their desire to have pages with “a predominantly neutral colour palette with colour being provided by large and dramatic imagery.”

Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/02/the_bbc_prepares_a_new_visual_identity_f.php

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on February 18, 2010 5:26 PM

http://scifiwire.com/2010/01/firefly-to-live-on-in-new.php?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Not sure if this was posted earlier, found this at SlayAlive forums. Titan books is the publisher,no dates yet. Jane Espenson is writing one of the stories focusing on Kaylee and Wash.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Whedonesque | a weblog about Joss Whedon, on February 18, 2010 4:33 PM

Via Infrastructurist and Martha Kang McGill comes this snapshot of urban life in America. McGill took census data to illustrate how people in various cities across the country commute to work, and while Houston’s red is reflected in tales of traffic jams and pollution, New York’s blue is a soothing reminder of our need for a vibrant subway system. No other city in the country approaches New York City’s reliance on public transit just as a means of commuting to work, and the state and city should remember that as they prepare to let the MTA’s coffers run dry. (Click the image to enlarge. It’ll open in a new window.)

©2010 Second Ave. Sagas | A New York City Subway Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Originally posted by Benjamin Kabak from Second Ave. Sagas | A New York City Subway Blog, on February 18, 2010 2:00 PM

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

Originally posted by Matt from WordPress.com News, on February 18, 2010 2:00 PM

 

We want copying and pasting content within Google Docs to just work. So, today we’re launching a new web clipboard that improves copy and paste in Google Docs. This new clipboard temporarily stores items you’ve copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into other Google Docs.

 

 

via googledocs.blogspot.com

 

 

I hope there's an API for this.

 

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on February 18, 2010 11:56 AM

skidder:

I admire what Rachelle has accomplished, and it’s common for web designers to adapt ideas from other sites. But this is a bit silly.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything this high-profile so directly ripped off.

But also, ya gotta love that Kidder now thinks he can move into snark, given his new job in editorial!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on February 18, 2010 10:07 AM

I'm confused. Why didn't they just go with "WOMEN ARE WHORES"?

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on February 18, 2010 9:38 AM

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
--Angela Davis

Letterpress interpretation of Jen Bekman's slogan "Live with art, It's good for you!" Art print produced exclusively for 20x200. Created entirely from antique wood type and ornaments. Printed by the Cranky Pressman.

Originally posted by Courtney from Feministing, on February 18, 2010 7:53 AM

The Department of City Planning has mostly zoned for growth near transit, as in its plan for downtown Jamaica (left). Where the city has encouraged growth far from transit, however, car-oriented developments have followed, like Schaefer Landing in Williamsburg (right).

This is the first installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Department of Transportation has built hundreds of miles of bike lanes and given acres of Times Square to pedestrians. Together with the MTA, the city is moving to construct a new rapid bus network for New York. But when it comes to livability and green transportation, perhaps the biggest legacy of the Bloomberg years will be something less tangible: Zoning.

Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden have rezoned one-fifth of New York City, approved countless special permits for developers, and assisted with financing for favored projects. Those decisions -- the scope of which haven't been seen since the total overhaul of NYC's zoning code in 1961 -- will shape the future of the city for generations. "The simple act of rezoning these areas," said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, "has already or will spur significant change in the landscape, the skyline, and the character of these neighborhoods."

PlaNYC forecasts that one million new residents will call New York City home by 2030. Zoning determines where growth happens and where those new New Yorkers will live. It can focus development in dense, transit-rich parts of the city or in more auto-dependent neighborhoods. And that in turn can spell the difference between a New York that increasingly favors transit, walking, and bicycling to get around, and a New York with more congestion, pollution, and dangerous streets.

Grading purely on location, the Bloomberg/Burden rezonings are, by and large, a bright spot in the administration's record, though not without significant flaws and missed opportunities.

The general thrust of the changes has been to funnel growth into relatively transit-rich locations. Simon McDonnell, a research fellow at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, has conducted a detailed analysis of recent rezonings that examines proximity to transit. His research determined that, between 2003 and 2007, about three quarters of the lots rezoned for denser development were within a half-mile walk of rail transit stations. However, two thirds of downzoned lots -- where density has been restricted -- were also close to stations.

McDonnell's research suggests that even while the Bloomberg Administration has zoned for growth to be centered around transit, it has also closed off the possibility of more intensive transit-oriented development. The overall effect is positive, but it could be even better. "It's fair to say," McDonnell concluded, "that a majority of the net new residential capacity that came online during this time period was near rail transit."

The Department of City Planning has rezoned 20 percent of the city under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. Click for an interactive version of this map on the planning department site.

The Department of City Planning cites prominent upzonings in transit rich areas like Downtown Brooklyn and the Bronx's Lower Concourse as examples of its transit-oriented strategy. At the same time, in particularly car-dependent areas like the Bayside neighborhood of northeastern Queens, the planning department has ensured that major development will not occur.

Joan Byron, director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development, noted that "the political pressure to do these downzonings has often come from self-protective, predominantly homeowner communities," but that she still believes such downzonings promote sustainability.

The combination of zoning for density near transit and downzoning in car-dependent areas is a significant innovation, said L. Nicolas Ronderos, Director of Urban Development Programs at the Regional Plan Association. In praising what he called a "double approach," Ronderos argued that the planning department "sees transit-oriented development not just through the lens of rail but also of automobiles. It's transit-oriented development not only as increasing density around transit, but decreasing density where there is none."

While most upzonings have planned for growth close to transit, there are important exceptions. Bowles pointed to the 2005 rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint as an example of particularly backwards transportation planning. "There was a plan to create thousands of units of new housing on the waterfront," he said, "many of which would come in a Greenpoint neighborhood that had pretty deficient access to transit networks."

The typical rezoning is tough to classify as an attempt to increase or decrease density across an entire neighborhood. Rather, the general strategy at the planning department has been to increase density and introduce a mix of uses along avenues and in areas next to transit, while preserving the existing character of side streets and more distant areas, often through downzoning.

The rezoning in Jamaica channels growth along bigger streets and near transit. Image: NYC Dept. of City Planning.

Department spokesperson Rachaele Raynoff pointed to the major rezoning in Jamaica as illustrative of this approach. "Around the AirTrain, we zoned for growth," she said. "It's a tremendous opportunity with the confluence of subway lines and the LIRR. And yet many of the low-density residential blocks further away from transit were protected."

All told, the rezonings of the last eight years have laid the ground for New York to build on its unique strengths as a transit-rich city. It's a major accomplishment, but Bloomberg and Burden have more work ahead of them to fully deliver on the promise of a city that grows sustainably. As the next post in this series will show, zoning for growth near transit won't necessarily translate into transit-oriented development or a walkable city.

Originally posted by Noah Kazis from Streetsblog New York City, on February 18, 2010 7:46 AM

With fans continuing to wonder about the Pollin family's level of involvement in the deconstruction of the Wizards, I found Caron Butler's explanation of how he learned of his trade particularly noteworthy. "It's been going on for like the last month, the rumors and everything," Butler said during a Thursday morning phone appearance on ESPN2's First Take. "Probably that Thursday, before All-Star, I got a phone call from Mrs. Pollin, just talking to me about the state of the team, the future of the team, that something might happen. She had a great deal of respect for me, just like I have for her and her family, and she reached out to me and let me know first-hand." Dana Jacobson then asked Butler about his comment that the trade was a breath of fresh air, and he repeated his previous thoughts.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from D.C. Sports Bog, on February 18, 2010 7:30 AM

Heating properties of cast iron (top) vs. aluminum (bottom). [Photograph: Cooking Issues]

Over on the French Culinary Institute's Cooking Issues blog, Dave Arnold has created a great cast iron–cooking primer that explains the science behind the cookware, including this great bit that dispels the notion of even heating:

The popular wisdom that cast iron cookware provides even heat is misleading. A cast iron skillet placed on a gas burner will develop distinct hot spots where the flame touches the pan. If you heat the center of a cast iron pan, you will find that the heat travels slowly toward the pan's edge, with a significant temperature gradient between the center and the edge. The pan will heat very unevenly because cast iron is a relatively poor heat conductor compared to materials like aluminum and copper. An aluminum pan will heat more evenly because heat travels quickly across aluminum. Because of poor heat conduction, undersized burners are incompatible with cast iron cooking. The edges of a large cast iron pan will never get hot on a tiny burner. On properly sized burners you can minimize hot spots by heating slowly, but the best way to evenly heat cast iron is in the oven.

In the photos above, Arnold demonstrates the heating properties of cast iron (top) vs aluminum (bottom) by sprinkling flour on the surface and taking time-lapse photos as the flour browns.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on February 18, 2010 7:30 AM

If you’ve ever asked where the best coffee in NYC is, Liz Clayton just answered you.

twitchy » Blog Archive » twitchy does nyc: a handy map.

Filed under: cafes, coffee, NYC, travel

Originally posted by Mike White from ShotZombies.com, on February 18, 2010 6:53 AM

From his superb blog:

Christy Lemire wrote me: “So, everyone seems pretty moved by the Esquire piece on you, but I’m wondering what you thought about it. It’s so intimate, personal.”

Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? It was also well written, I thought. When I turned to it in the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It’s just as well it’s out there. That’s how I look, after all.

It was an inexplicable instinct that led me to agree when Chris Jones contacted me requesting an interview. The idea of Esquire appealed to me. I did a bunch of interviews for them in the 1970s, when it was the crucible of the New Journalism.

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on February 18, 2010 6:45 AM

Our recommendation is that pages have a predominantly neutral colour palette with colour being provided by large and dramatic imagery. The highlight colour is used sparingly to create vibrancy and draw the eye to key areas of the page. Lovely set of graphic standards for the BBC's digital services --> Source

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on February 18, 2010 6:23 AM

Yes, corporations can now spend unlimited funds on US political campaigns. But by openly taking sides do they open themselves up to alienating big chunks of their customer bases? A new advice memo from a leading DC lobbying firm advises clients on how to spend without customers or anyone else having to find out.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on February 18, 2010 6:12 AM

Sick of the cold weather and figure skating? In the mood for a different kind of flying blades? The Criterion Collection has just launched a channel on Hulu, on which you can now watch six features in the classic Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman series for free. Currently showing are The Tale of Zatoichi, The Tale of Zatoichi Continues, New Tale of Zatoichi, The Fugitive, On the Road, and Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold. All six films star Shintaro Katsu in his most iconic role, as the legendary blind masseur who lives by the yakuza code and answers his foes with a deadly cane sword.

You can also view the first installment below, right here in the Criterion Current. Check out these terrific movies, and help us make our new Hulu adventure a success. We’ll be adding more films on a rolling basis, so check back often and, as always, let us know what you think.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Criterion Current, on February 18, 2010 6:04 AM

Remember Christoph Niemann's excellent I Lego N.Y.? He's coming out with a book based on that post:

There's a short trailer for the book on YouTube. (via @h_fj)

Tags: books   Christoph Niemann   I Lego N.Y.   Legos

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on February 18, 2010 5:50 AM

Fans of this blog, Next Day Flyers got in touch to offer free printing of 1,000 standard business cards to one lucky reader. These are glossy, full color and double-sided and would make a nice subversive palm card for a worthy cause. Next Day will include free ground shipping anywhere in the Continental U.S.

Next Day Flyers is an offset printing company that prints posters, flyers, and door hangers.

To enter, leave a comment here before February 28, 11:59PM EST. You must include your email address (though it will not show up publicly on the site) and you must be 18. On March 1, 2010 one commenter will be selected randomly.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on February 18, 2010 5:32 AM

Cashing in on the popularity of group dinners at restaurants like Momofuku Noodle and Ssam and Resto, chef April Bloomfield will start serving Suckling Pig Dinners for 8 - 12 people at The Breslin's chef's table right by the kitchen three times a night. The dinners, held at 5:30 or 6 PM, 8 or 8:30 PM, or 10:30 or 11 PM, start on Monday and run $65 a head ($75 with dessert). Dinners include whole roasted suckling pig, caesar salad, duck fat roasted potatoes, roasted fennel, salsa rossa and salsa verde, and roasted pumpkin. Wine, gratuities, and any additional items are extra, so a soiree here could add up. But then again, sucking pig. Want in? Call 646-214-5764 or email chefs.table@thebreslin.com.
· All Coverage of The Breslin [~ENY~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on February 18, 2010 4:57 AM

I’m an acknowledged Apple fanboy. I’m an acknowledged BP partisan.

These two are starting to come together for me in a way that’s got nothing to do with technology and a lot more to do with baseball. Actually, it’s not much about baseball either. Here at BP, you’re going to get some of the most advanced statistical work around. The recent series explaining SIERA, showing the formula, breaking down how it works and why it was better than other similar tools, was phenomenal.

For some people. We need to understand that.

I often jokingly call myself the guy at BP who can’t do math. I took heat last year during the judging of BP Idol for the fact that I often seemed “anti-statistical.” Actually, I prefer to think of myself as pro-understanding. Take a look at these two sentences:

1) “Albert Pujols‘ 10.8 WARP1 was highest in the league, topping Zack Greinke’s 9.0, unadjusted.”

2) “Albert Pujols was two wins better than Zack Greinke last season.”

Statheads probably won’t see a difference. They say more or less the same thing. I’ll argue that while statheads care about how the sausage is made, seeing the sausage is losing a lot of people. Harold Reynolds - who is not stupid and who has a brother who’s player agency uses advanced statistics regularly in negotiations - was absolutely lost in an MLB Network discussion the other night about Win Probability. Reynolds is not alone and more importantly, Reynolds is probably more advanced that the vast majority of baseball fans.

Remember, ESPN tried to roll out OPS last year as a “new statistic,” explaining it on virtually every broadcast of Sunday Night Baseball. Jon Miller would read a short script, give an example, and then Joe Morgan would say something about the Big Red Machine. All planned out, in great detail. Yet people I know at ESPN have told me that in their testing, their viewers rejected OPS as “too complicated.”

Some of this goes back to the concept that advanced sabermetrics is not mainstream. It’s been several years since Moneyball came out and to many, that was their first inkling that this kind of stuff was going on. Around BP and much of the web at the time, people were saying “nice book, not groundbreaking” but around America, people were saying “unga unga” or whatever it is that stone age tribe in the Amazon says when they first see fire. Moneyball was a bestseller because Michael Lewis is an amazing storyteller. (How good? He made Sandra Bullock into an Oscar contender.)

People like stories.

Last year during the World Series, I tried to figure out the difference between the reader base at BP, a successful niche baseball site, and the viewing audience of a World Series game. I did the math wrong (natch) but Keith Woolner stepped in to correct me, bringing a nice tidy number. 99.44%, just like Ivory soap, of the Series audience had probably never heard of BP. The sabermetrics you take for granted in stories here and around the web isn’t just ignored, but unknown, by the vast majority of baseball fans. People interested in complex formula and advanced baseball theories is a rounding error to ESPN and MLB Network.

Which brings me back to the iPad. Before it’s even released, people are complaining that it’s a dumbed down computer, crippled by what it doesn’t do or doesn’t have. Apple maintains that it’s a device for people that don’t need a computer and the debate across the web is raging. Disagree if you must, but consider what happens when a massively-used site like Facebook makes a relatively minor change to its website. Think about it - how many people did you hear whinging about the new feed? (Which makes me shudder a little bit for poor Kathy, our CS (customer service) wondergirl, who will have to face similar complaints when BP rolls out it’s new design.)

Keith Woolner wrote about the Hilbert questions, things baseball would address over the next decade, in one of the early BP annuals. Here in 2010, I think that instead of answering more and more esoteric questions in the next ten years, baseball analysis as a whole would be better off pausing and trying to explain some of it to the guy in Aisle 4, Row 8, Seat 113.

I’m not saying we should actually “Be Stupid”, but I think Ed Finkler has it right in that article when he says:

“When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.”

In another brilliant post on the iPad, Matt Gammell could be talking about sabermetrics when he says:

“The percentage of your customer base who make a buying decision based on the openness of a system (in terms of system-level customisation options, use of open source software or otherwise) is vanishingly tiny. They’re very vocal, certainly, but commercially they’re irrelevant. Pandering to this segment will most certainly damage your penetration into the market. Be extremely wary about sacrificing large-scale appeal for the sake of a tiny but noisy technical minority. The tablet space is in no way designed for or aimed at such users.”

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a call for anyone to dumb things down, despite the title. No, we need the high-level boffin work, but we also need to figure out a way to ease people into this. We need a gateway drug. We need an educational initiative. We need a PR campaign. We need to evangelize. We need to market. We need to explain, over and over. We need to find ways to engage and educate each and every baseball consumer who’s willing to listen and wants to learn. We need to fight the anti-logic bias this country has and we need to do it soon.

The tech world is about to get the iPad. What’s baseball going to get?

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on February 18, 2010 4:10 AM

As seen on deviantART via Albotas.

Originally posted by Brian Ashcraft from Kotaku, on February 18, 2010 1:30 AM

This is the last time we write about this, promise.

But it turns out that a week before the super-liberal TED crowd was shocked by comedian Sarah Silverman’s repeated use of the word “retarded” on stage (so much so that TED organizer Chris Anderson tweeted how “god-awful” she was), she had agreed to donate her time to a fundraiser for children with Down syndrome.

She was ridiculing Sarah Palin’s whole argument that the word “retard” can’t be used.

The crowd, mostly bay area wine and cheese liberals, should have been cheering her on. But it went over their head, and TED stepped in it.

So just to recap, TED invites Sarah Silverman, a shock and insult comedian, to the event to give a talk. She turns up and shocks and insults, but for a good reason. The crowd doesn’t get it even though it plays right into their politics, and the event organizer trashes her publicly. Silverman hits back on Twitter, and there’s a quick cameo by Steve Case in the whole drama. Then it turns out Silverman is already donating her time to help fight the very issue she brought up in the talk.

In honor of the whole episode, TechCrunch is purchasing 10 tickets to Twenty Wonder on March 6 in Los Angeles on behalf of TED and Chris Anderson. If you’d like one of the tickets, let us know below and the first ten get them (say if you want two to bring a friend). Or buy your own. It’ll go to a much better cause than the $6,000 TED attendees spend to feel good about themselves for a couple of days.

Originally posted by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, on February 17, 2010 8:08 PM

First found at Grand Cards, who led me to A Cardboard Problem, who linked to Topps Twitter...

2010 Allen & Ginter

Veddy nice-a. But where did the design come from? Aha, that's where I come in.

The Allen & Ginter logo design has been heavily tweaked to convert the Cigarettes to Topps and to modernize it up a bit, but it's still obviously based on the original N3. The name text is also similar to the N29 Champions Series Two set, but I like the Indian Chief set better so I chose it. I could find no original Allen & Ginter designs that have the rounded border like the 2010 model, but pretty much all my cards have rounded borders so it's appropriate. These look fantastic as always and it's nice to see Topps mixing it up a bit lately.

Here are the originals from my collection:

N2 Celebrated American Indian Chiefs

N3 Arms of All Nations

N22 Racing Colors of the World

I really need to find those last three cards for my type set...

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on February 17, 2010 7:50 PM

Unicons is a little project I put together today, making it easier to insert some of those little Unicode symbols (like ☃ or ☺ or ✌) into web text fields. You know, the text fields you see on comment forms or Twitter.

The project is hosted at Github and feedback is welcome!

Originally posted by Brad from bradchoate.com, on February 17, 2010 6:40 PM

With Google's plans to include Buzz in Google Apps for enterprise customers, Microsoft needs a way to get social media into Outlook, and the Outlook Social Connector add-on seems to be it. When Office 2010 ships--in the first half of this year--it will have support for Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, but--oddly--not Twitter. Here's my review of the current version, which integrates LinkedIn contacts and news feeds with Outlook 2003 and 2007 now: Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Is No Buzz (But Maybe That's a Good Thing) [Fast Company]

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on February 17, 2010 3:43 PM

Tomorrow's regularly scheduled Rakudo release is the first one since the long-running "ng" branch became master. It represents both a huge step forward and at the same time a fairly major regression. Internally, the changes are enormous; some of the biggest include:

• We're parsing using a new implementation of Perl 6 regexes by pmichaud++. It is a huge improvement, supporting amongst other things protoregexes, a basic form of LTM, variable declarations - including contextuals - inside regexes and more. The AST it generates is part of the PAST tree rather than having a distinct AST, which is a neater, more hackable approach. The issues with lexical scopes and regexes are resolved. Closures in regexes work.
• NQP is also re-built atop of this. It incorporates regex and grammar support, so now we run both grammar and actions through the one compiler. It's bootstrapped.
• In light of those major changes, we started putting the grammar back together from scratch. A large part of this was copy and paste - from STD.pm. The grammar we have now is far, far closer to STD than what we had before. Operator precedence parsing is handled in the same kind of way. We've started to incorporate some of the nice STD error detection bits, and catch and nicely report some Perl 5-isms.
• Since the grammar got re-done, we've been taking the same approach with the actions (the methods that take parse tree nodes and make AST nodes). Thanks to contextual variable support and other improvements, a lot of stuff got WAY cleaner.
• The list/array implementation has been done over, and this time it's lazy. There's certainly rough edges, but it's getting better every day. The work to implement laziness has led to many areas of the spec getting fleshed out, too - a consequence of being the first implementation on the scene I guess.
• All class and role construction is done through a meta-model rather than "magic". The Parrot role composition algorithm is no longer relied upon, instead we have our own implementation mostly written in NQP.
• The assignment model was improved to do much less copying, so we should potentially perform a bit better there.
• Lexical handling was refactored somewhat, and the changes should eliminate a common source of those pesky Null PMC Access errors.

Every one of these - and some others I didn't mention - are important for getting us towards the Rakudo * release. The downside is that since we've essentially taken Rakudo apart and put it back together again - albeit on far, far better foundations - we're still some way from getting all of the language constructs, built-in types and functions back in place that we had before. It's often not just a case of copy-paste; many of the list related things now have to be written with laziness in mind, for example.

So anyway, if you download tomorrow's release and your code doesn't compile or run, this post should explain - at least at a higher level - why. After a slower December and January, Rakudo development has now once again picked up an incredible pace, and the last couple of week's efforts by many Rakudo hackers have made this release far better than I had feared it was going to be. If we can keep this up, the March release should be a very exciting one.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on February 17, 2010 3:18 PM

Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World combines techniques or themes from some seriously great novels of the last fifty years, including Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a faux-historical writing style I’ve seen before but whose origin I can’t place. Unfortunately, it ended up less satisfying than the great novels it emulates, so while a solid novel in its own right, it suffers from the inevitable comparisons the reader will make while moving through the book.

The center of the book is the estate of the slaveowner Henry Townsend, a black man who became free around age 20 but who chose to purchase slaves for himself and build his fortune on the backs of members of his own race. Townsend dies at the beginning of the novel, although we see large chunks of his life through flashbacks, and the bulk of the plot revolves around the gradual decaying of the tight order of things – the business operations and the formal and informal hierarchies – of the tiny empire he’s built on that estate. The wide cast of characters includes slaves, freed blacks, and whites whose lives intersected with the Townsends, often with disastrous results.

While whites are largely depicted as forces of evil in the book, whether directly bringing evil on the black characters or simply by opening the door for ill fortunate, Jones targets black slaveowners and even highlights black slaves who exercised formal or informal authority over others for their moral culpability in the suffering of slaves. Using a black slaveowner and his family at the story’s center allows him to remove the facile white-bad-black-good dichotomy that could obscure the greater themes of morality he’s trying to explore, and the resulting moral ambiguity suffuses the novel, such as the question of whether a “fair” slaveowner is any better than a cruel one, or what the value of a law is when men charged with enforcing it fail to do so or even openly flout it. Jones mentions other outrages of the time like anti-miscegenation laws, but brushes past them because they’re not worth his time – his interest, beyond just telling a story, seems to lie in exploring situations that lack right or obvious answers, and thus he ignores those where modern sensibilities will lead all readers to the same horror or repulsion.

Where The Known World fell a little short for me was in narrative greed – it’s obvious from the start that the plantation will crumble without Henry Townsend, and it was evident to me early in the book that Caldonia, his widow, wasn’t up to the task of managing it, which presaged, at a high level, what was going to happen with the slaves and the estate. The interest of the plot, for me, was largely in finding out the fates of the various central characters, particularly the slaves, although Henry’s parents do figure into the last major plot strand, one that I thought had a strong symbolic significance and was the only area where Jones took square aim at whites, even non-slaveowners, for their role in the great cultural tragedy of slavery. And Jones remains true to life – some characters find positive, if not actually happy, endings, while others meet tragic ends and some just end up in the great grey middle.

The faux-historical trick I mentioned in the intro merits a mention. Jones intersperses fake historical facts, written in the dry manner of a history text or even a census register, throughout the book, whether to tell us the fate of a minor character or to give shape or color to a place or a county or a period of time. I found it very effective, and it gave the book the feel of a longer one because of its level of detail, without requiring the time an 800-page book demands.

Next up: Since finishing this, I read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, the last published Christie novel, a solid but unspectacular Miss Marple novel that, as always, had me second-guessing my instincts (which turned out to be right, although I can hardly take credit after doubting myself so heavily) after I thought I’d picked out the culprit. After finishing that this morning, I’ve started Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year before Jones won with The Known World.

Originally posted by keith from The dish, on February 17, 2010 3:15 PM

Esquire has a really nice feature on Roger Ebert, who has experienced a rebirth as a writer since a series of operations .

But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing -- it's like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It's not the food or the drink he worries about anymore -- I went thru a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note -- but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left.

I've always liked Ebert and I consider this version an upgrade...he's doing his best work. (thx, david)

Tags: Roger Ebert

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on February 17, 2010 2:51 PM

Brilliant, simple idea. Kick a soccer ball around, have it capture some of the energy, then give a plug so you can get the energy back out. Then give it away in Africa.

The ball uses inductive coil technology–similar to flashlights that power up when shaken. Each 15 minutes of play with the ball generates enough power to light up an LED lamp for 3 hours, so a soccer game could easily provide light for a day.

In most African countries, 95 percent of the population is living off-grid with no access to electricity. With sOccket, people in developing nations will no longer need to walk 3 hours simply to charge their cell phones. The power will—quite literally—be in their hands. The sOccket ball can be used to light an LED lamp, or charge a cellphone or battery.

Jessica Lin is a Changemaker | Changemakers.

(Via Jane McGonigal @avantgame)

Originally posted by Raph from Raph's Website, on February 17, 2010 2:29 PM

If this were my first year of Allen and Ginter, I’d be oooing and awwing at this card.  It should make at least one group of  collectors happy for the smiling Wright and the somewhat dinged or rounded corners.  However, this would be my third year of A&G, so I see it and think, ‘Yep, that’s Allen & Ginter alright.’  Still a nice looking card.

When I saw this I instantly thought Champs Hockey.  Didn’t Upper Deck have Dinosaur’s two years ago?

No word on set breakdown, but I can’t imagine it’s much different from years past.  In fact, I imagine Topps could issue the same set over and over while just tweaking some of the inserts and A&G would still sell like mad.

Another tentative buy based on my economy later this year.

Oh, and there’s more pics at Topps Twitter feed, one of the black border parallel (which looks a lot like the Wright card only with a black border), and one of a Tony Hawk signature card (which looks like an Allen & Ginter autograph card).  Check them out if you choose to here.

Originally posted by handcollated from Hand Collated, on February 17, 2010 12:19 PM

Our pediatrician's advice about feeding kids is pretty simple: give them whatever you're having, puree it if necessary. If they eat it, great, if they don't, that's it until the next meal. So this is what we've done with Ollie and it's worked fairly well. It means I don't cook anything special for him, or feed him a second meal if he doesn't eat the first, or alter what we give him based on what we think he likes. When Ollie was younger, he loved broccoli. Then he pretty much stopped eating it whenever it was on his plate. These days he consistently eats avocado and sweet potato.

So the other night I made short ribs for dinner with sides of baked sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli. I threw some avocado on his plate because we had a bit leftover. I expected Ollie to eat his two favorites, ignore the broccoli, and try a bit of short rib. Instead Ollie ate all his broccoli and didn't touch anything else!

Now I see how important it is to not develop any ideas about a kid's "favorite" food, and to continue to expose them to everything. This was so eye-opening for me, even if he doesn't touch broccoli for another six months!

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on February 17, 2010 10:47 AM

It's kind of insane how well he can ski, I'm totally amazed. A little over 2.5 years and less than 20 days total on skis. I can't wait for next year when he'll be all over the mountain!

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on February 17, 2010 10:40 AM

Graham Annable posted a bunch of LOST-themed sketches on Twitter (@grickle) leading up to the premiere of the show a few weeks ago. He’s finally compiled them into a photoset on Flickr: Foggy Memories of LOST.

Vera Brosgol did the same, though you’ll need to dig a little deeper through her Twitpic account to find them.

Update: Vera now added hers to Flickr as well!

---

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Graham Annable, Lost, TV, Vera Brosgol

Originally posted by John Martz from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on February 17, 2010 10:34 AM

[ by way of ]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on February 17, 2010 10:29 AM

I am thrilled to announce I've landed a pinch-me dream job: I'm now a Project Director at Expert Labs, the new non-profit headed up by Anil Dash. I'll be in charge of developing ThinkTank. Here's what happened.

Last March I was thinking about buying a netbook, and asked my Twitter followers a question: Do you have a netbook? What do you love or hate about it?

When I got back 243 informed opinions by savvy netbook owners, I knew I needed a way to easily parse and share the most useful replies--and ThinkTank was born. ThinkTank is a work-in-progress web application that archives your conversations and social graph on Twitter (and eventually beyond). As you tweet, ThinkTank captures, filters, and ranks responses to those tweets so you can see the most useful responses first.

In other words, ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses. That's what makes it a perfect fit for Expert Labs. Expert Labs' goal is to make government run better by helping policy makers take advantage of the same kinds of crowdsourcing tools that the rest of us take for granted. Expert Labs is also part of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the world's largest general scientific community. While you and I can use social networks to figure out what kind of netbook to buy, policy makers can use social networks to tap the expertise of scientists and technologists and inform decisions on how to govern. ThinkTank's goal is to facilitate that.

The most amazing part of this whole thing? The first project that will be putting ThinkTank to use is for the White House itself. The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included. Here's more on the Grand Challenges initiative from the White House.

As for ThinkTank, three things about its design are of note: ThinkTank piggybacks on existing social networks so that users don't have to sign up for Yet Another Service to ask and answer questions; ThinkTank archives conversations and contacts into a standalone datastore you control; and ThinkTank is open source and community-developed.

1. The conversations come to you. The success and popularity of Q&A services and communities like Ask MetaFilter, Stack Overflow, Aardvark and Yahoo! Answers prove that netizens want to offer their expertise and volunteer responses to questions that matter to them. Instead of building another island or service that users have to sign up for, ThinkTank creates that Q&A structure within social networks people are already on. Right now, ThinkTank captures and manipulates Twitter data; eventually, ThinkTank will work with other social networks like Facebook, blogs, and other emergent status-based social networks, thanks to the rich APIs those services provide.
2. ThinkTank creates a standalone archive you control. ThinkTank is a web application you install on your own server, like WordPress. Your ThinkTank instance synchronizes your tweets (and eventually Facebook status updates and other posts) into a single database on your hosting provider. While most Twitter clients query the Twitter.com service live, ThinkTank is a standalone datastore separate from Twitter. Unlike other social network aggregators like FriendFeed or Google Buzz, you can query and filter ThinkTank's data in the ways that make the most sense for your purposes, because it lives in a database you control. Eventually, ThinkTank instances will be able to communicate peer-to-peer, independent of their source services.
3. ThinkTank is free, open source, and developed by the community. ThinkTank's purpose is to help both policy makers and you tap "cloud expertise"; appropriately, the project itself needs the expertise of willing programmers and testers to achieve its goals. Right now ThinkTank is a pre-alpha work in progress, an open source project that a community of contributors is currently building. It's free for anyone to download, modify, and help define--especially now, in its formative stages. We hope you join us.

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to grow ThinkTank from a weekend project for asking my friends about netbooks to a bridge between the public and policy makers. Lend a hand, won't you? Now that ThinkTank's at Expert Labs, when you contribute a feature or fix a bug, you're not only getting ThinkTank's benefits for your personal use, you're helping policy makers build a better government. Follow and fork the ThinkTank project on GitHub, join the ThinkTank mailing list, and follow @thinktankapp on Twitter.

In Support of Grand Challenges [Expert Labs]
Expert Labs, ThinkTank, Gina Trapani and our Grand Challenges [Anil Dash]

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on February 17, 2010 9:59 AM

I am thrilled to announce I've landed a pinch-me dream job: I'm now a Project Director at Expert Labs, the new non-profit headed up by Anil Dash. I'll be in charge of developing ThinkTank. Here's what happened.

Last March I was thinking about buying a netbook, and asked my Twitter followers a question: Do you have a netbook? What do you love or hate about it?

When I got back 243 informed opinions by savvy netbook owners, I knew I needed a way to easily parse and share the most useful replies--and ThinkTank was born. ThinkTank is a work-in-progress web application that archives your conversations and social graph on Twitter (and eventually beyond). As you tweet, ThinkTank captures, filters, and ranks responses to those tweets so you can see the most useful responses first.

In other words, ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses. That's what makes it a perfect fit for Expert Labs. Expert Labs' goal is to make government run better by helping policy makers take advantage of the same kinds of crowdsourcing tools that the rest of us take for granted. Expert Labs is also part of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the world's largest general scientific community. While you and I can use social networks to figure out what kind of netbook to buy, policy makers can use social networks to tap the expertise of scientists and technologists and inform decisions on how to govern. ThinkTank's goal is to facilitate that.

The most amazing part of this whole thing? The first project that will be putting ThinkTank to use is for the White House itself. The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included. Here's more on the Grand Challenges initiative from the White House.

As for ThinkTank, three things about its design are of note: ThinkTank piggybacks on existing social networks so that users don't have to sign up for Yet Another Service to ask and answer questions; ThinkTank archives conversations and contacts into a standalone datastore you control; and ThinkTank is open source and community-developed.

1. The conversations come to you. The success and popularity of Q&A services and communities like Ask MetaFilter, Stack Overflow, Aardvark and Yahoo! Answers prove that netizens want to offer their expertise and volunteer responses to questions that matter to them. Instead of building another island or service that users have to sign up for, ThinkTank creates that Q&A structure within social networks people are already on. Right now, ThinkTank captures and manipulates Twitter data; eventually, ThinkTank will work with other social networks like Facebook, blogs, and other emergent status-based social networks, thanks to the rich APIs those services provide.
2. ThinkTank creates a standalone archive you control. ThinkTank is a web application you install on your own server, like WordPress. Your ThinkTank instance synchronizes your tweets (and eventually Facebook status updates and other posts) into a single database on your hosting provider. While most Twitter clients query the Twitter.com service live, ThinkTank is a standalone datastore separate from Twitter. Unlike other social network aggregators like FriendFeed or Google Buzz, you can query and filter ThinkTank's data in the ways that make the most sense for your purposes, because it lives in a database you control. Eventually, ThinkTank instances will be able to communicate peer-to-peer, independent of their source services.
3. ThinkTank is free, open source, and developed by the community. ThinkTank's purpose is to help both policy makers and you tap "cloud expertise"; appropriately, the project itself needs the expertise of willing programmers and testers to achieve its goals. Right now ThinkTank is a pre-alpha work in progress, an open source project that a community of contributors is currently building. It's free for anyone to download, modify, and help define--especially now, in its formative stages. We hope you join us.

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to grow ThinkTank from a weekend project for asking my friends about netbooks to a bridge between the public and policy makers. Lend a hand, won't you? Now that ThinkTank's at Expert Labs, when you contribute a feature or fix a bug, you're not only getting ThinkTank's benefits for your personal use, you're helping policy makers build a better government. Follow and fork the ThinkTank project on GitHub, join the ThinkTank mailing list, and follow @thinktankapp on Twitter.

In Support of Grand Challenges [Expert Labs]
Expert Labs, ThinkTank, Gina Trapani and our Grand Challenges [Anil Dash]

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on February 17, 2010 9:59 AM

It’s been too long since we redesigned this blog. Years and years. It’s time for a complete redesign. We thought it would be a good idea to eat our own dogfood and choose a firm from Sortfolio to do the redesign.

Here’s how it works

On March 8th we’ll choose a firm listed on Sortfolio to redesign Signal vs. Noise (this blog). The firm will be a paid Pro listing, we will not consider free listings for this project. If you want to be considered, please upgrade your listing to Pro.

Budget, time frame, and scope

The budget for the redesign will be $8500. The time frame will be 30 days from start to final delivery of HTML/CSS templates. We’ll do the integration with our back end systems. The scope will be redesigning the overall look and feel, the main page including all the different post styles (long-form article, video embed, quote, link, etc), a post page with and without comments, the archive page, and possibly one more page yet to be determined.

We’d like the new design to accurately represent the 37signals aesthetic and brand, but we’re open to exploring alternate directions too as long as they are consistent with what we stand for. We can talk more about this with the firm we choose.

Interested? Here’s how to apply

We only want to consider firms that want the job. So here’s how it’ll work. If you are a Sortfolio Pro member (you have a paid listing), and you want to have a shot at the project, send us a tweet in the following format:

Hey @37signals, we want to redesign SvN. http://sortfolio.com/YOUR-SORTFOLIO-URL-HERE #sortfoliosvn

Your tweet must be in this format to be considered. We’ll review your work and get in touch if we have any further questions. We may also contact firms who haven’t tweeted if we think they may be a good match.

We’re excited to see how this works out.

Originally posted by Jason F. from Signal vs. Noise, on February 17, 2010 8:47 AM

Upcoming
Film Screenings & Events
The End of the Remake Trilogy

Blow Up, Stroll On

2006. Great Britain/USA. Directed by Christoph Draeger. A video remake of the club scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up. 3 min.

My Generation

read more

Originally posted by w from post.thing.net - A lean, mean, media machine., on February 17, 2010 7:50 AM

A few months ago, I started as director of Expert Labs, a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public. We're part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and because our goal could have seemed a bit nebulous I've held off on explaining the full vision of the effort until today, when we're announcing our first project, platform and project director. Here's the highlights:

• We'll be collaborating with the White House in support of the Grand Challenges initiative. The President has defined a list of the biggest scientific and technological challenges facing America, as part of his Strategy for American Innovation. But they need our help, especially from those of us in the scientific and technological community: What should our highest priorities be for the biggest technological challenges of our time? What items have been omitted from the President's list of priorities? In short: If you had to pick the next project on the scale of the moon landing, or the human genome sequencing, what would you suggest? And how would you find the leadership and community that would achieve that goal? These are the questions we want to help answer.

• To help get answers for these questions, Expert Labs will be sponsoring the development of a technology platform that allows policy makers and community members to ask questions across the existing social networks that exist on the web. My guideline for the technology platform was that it be free and open source, make smart use of existing technologies and APIs, have a thriving developer community, and be appropriate for use in cloud environments for easy deployment by government agencies, private industry, and even individuals. So I'm excited to announce that we've selected the ThinkTank application as our first official technology platform project at Expert Labs.

• And, as you might expect since we've agreed to sponsor her application, I'm ecstatic to announce that Gina Trapani is joining Expert Labs as our Project Director for the Grand Challenges project, overseeing our technology efforts around ThinkTank and making sure that the platform is a good fit for the community of policy makers, scientists, technologists and the general public that it's designed to serve. Gina is of course the founding editor of Lifehacker and publisher of Smarterware, a best-selling author, and a co-host of This Week in Google, one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet. She's also an incredible talent and a woman of remarkable character and I couldn't be more excited to have her on the team.

Phew! That's a lot of great news. Since I announced my role at Expert Labs two and a half months ago, we've been hard at work meeting with folks across the Federal Government to find out how we could be of the most value. The truth is, when I started this project, I really only had a hunch that there was something amazing happening at the confluence of technology and government. But the months since have shown that my optimism there is well-founded, even if it is still just early days for this kind of effort.

The Startup Mindset

You see, Expert Labs sits at an interesting intersection. We are not part of the government, don't take any money from the government or any tax dollars, and don't take orders from anyone in the White House or any other part of the administration. In the early days of refining Expert Labs, I saw us as something like a "gCombinator", creating technology that serves government needs, but with a model that looks a lot more like an entrepreneurial technology incubator.

And while we're proudly independent, we've also been given a remarkable amount of access. The federal government as a whole is making an incredibly rapid evolution towards becoming more open and accessible, particularly to technologists. You can look at something like the OpenGov Tracker and see the results of this in real time. That's not to say things are ideal; Only 611 ideas for improving government have been submitted in total thus far. But I think that we can get orders of magnitude more Americans to participate in, and suggest ideas for, better governance if we make it as easy as just using Twitter or Facebook. And I think we can provide great motivations for them to do so if we show that their ideas and inspiration have direct impact on the policy decisions that are made.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the tech industry that I have spent my career working in. I'm just a regular guy, who was working just a few years ago as a PHP coder building content management systems. Today, I've been able to go to the White House and help make the case that a better technology platform, connected to the social networks we already use, could have the same transformative effect on policy making that it did on the world of media or business. And they were ready to listen, not just to me, but to our entire community. (I'm not saying that to name drop; In the new world of open government, things like visitor records for the White House are actually easily accessible.) I mean, hell, I got excited just knowing that my project's website got linked to from the White House blog — imagine when that's a two-way conversation for all of us!

And if you're a web programmer today, you can have a huge impact, even if you don't know the first thing about government or policy. You don't have to work for the government to work for your country. All you have to do is follow the ThinkTank project and make submissions of any code fixes or improvements that you have. Or join the mailing list and become part of the community. Or simply run the app for your own business and submit your feature requests about how it could be better suited to answering large-scale questions on various social networks. Simply by playing with new technology, participating in an open source project, and sharing what you've learned about what works in crowdsourcing ideas online, you can make a huge impact in our government's ability to listen to our ideas.

Just Getting Started

I'm incredibly excited to get started with our first official project at Expert Labs, and there are more to come in the future. Today, I hope you'll read over the Grand Challenges Request for Information from the White House and understand a bit more about what this project is about. Then you can visit the Expert Labs site (or follow @expertlabs on Twitter) and keep up to date with us as both the technology platform and the overall Grand Challenges effort progress.

• Check out Gina's own announcement of coming on board with Expert Labs.
• We also have an official announcement on the Expert Labs site.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on February 17, 2010 7:44 AM

The mind behind FakeLocke.comBlog posted here.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on February 17, 2010 7:13 AM

From Recipes

"It's almost as easy as making a pot of tea. Except you also need cheesecloth."

[Photographs: Erin Zimmer]

This super-easy recipe for goat cheese seemed too good to be true. No backyard goats required? No rennet? (The animal enzymes usually required for cheese production.) No help from an older, wiser dairy farmer?

Nope. It's almost as easy as making a pot of tea. Except you also need cheesecloth and one other maybe-you-don't-have-this-lying-around-thing: a candy thermometer. But that's really it. In less than two hours, you'll have a little pouch of soft, fresh goat cheese.

Goat Cheese

Adapted from Kiss My Spatula

Ingredients

1 quart pasteurized goat's milk (avoid ultra-pasteurized)
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 clove freshly grated garlic
A few pinches coarse salt

Herbs (up to you) but recommended: Rosemary, chives, parsley, herbs de Provence, fennel fronds, dill, and other non-herbs like dried apricots.

Procedure

1. Fill a medium saucepan with goat's milk. Heat gradually until it reaches 180°F. Watch closely. You can run in and out of the kitchen, but don't get too distracted. It shouldn't take more than about 15 minutes.

2. Once it hits the magical temperature, remove from heat and stir in lemon juice. Let stand until milk starts to curdle**, about 20 seconds.

**Don't expect curdles, like cottage cheese curdles. As you can see in this photo, slight clumping will occur, but nothing too drastic. Don't go pouring in a bucket of lemon juice, thinking nothing has happened. But you can add a few extra droplets if nothing is actually happening. Also: blood orange isn't as effective as lemon in creating the right curd texture, just sayin'.

3. Line a colander with several layers of cheesecloth—really, several. Otherwise you'll lose precious goat cheese through the soggy cloth. Place over a large bowl to catch the whey drips.

4. Ladle milk into colander. Pull up and tie the four corners of the cheesecloth together and hang on the handle of a wooden spoon. (This was my favorite part, second to eating it of course.) Set over a very deep bowl.

5. Allow whey to drain (drip, drip, drip) until a soft, ricotta-like consistency is reached inside the cloth, about 1 to 1.5 hours.

6. Transfer to a bowl and fold in salt, garlic, and flavors of your choice. Serve on fresh bread, salads, with fruit, or just straight-up. Can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge, but after a few days, the consistency isn't as lusciously smooth and spreadable.

7. Eat it on everything.

8. Repeat. Make as much as possible.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on February 17, 2010 6:30 AM

Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.

Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Originally posted by Deron Bauman from clusterflock, on February 17, 2010 6:29 AM

It’s true. I’ll be taking over as editor-in-chief of theAwl—a job I’ve wanted ever since early February of 2010.  Spiersblr was purchased for the contents of The Change Bowl, which we’re not releasing at this time.  I’ll be replacing Alex Balk, who doubled the company’s bourbon consumption.

And between you and me, it’s rumored that Cat is out the door, too.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on February 17, 2010 5:28 AM

This morning, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of Spiersblr. Unrelatedly, we will be replacing Awl editor Alex Balk with Spiersblr's publisher, Elizabeth Spiers. (Balk was offered the position of Spiers' assistant, but declined, due to a weak back.) Awl publisher David Cho, an original Spiersblr investor, will be returning any profits made from his investment in Spiersblr to The Awl. Spiersblr will act as a channel of The Awl, covering Silicon Alley theory, advances in programming languages and everything that is wrong with former actress Justine Bateman (a rich vein to mine, you must admit), as well as breaking up-to-the-minute Formspringing. The Awl itself will focus more on cat-related news and video clips taken off of the TV and then put online. Simultaneously, we will be demanding that Tumblr relinquish Awl.tumblr.com, just because we can, and they will do it so fast it'll make your head spin. "It's still all about scale and success. There's no online living in cachet," announced remaining Awl founding editor Choire Sicha. "As part of this expansion strategy, we have continued to grow the number of Executive Decision Makers who visit our site." The Awl will not be releasing the acquisition price for Spiersblr, if any.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on February 17, 2010 5:10 AM

If you are feeling nostalgic for the days of scanning shelves full of well worn VHS tapes at your local video store, I recommend Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box. Fantagraphics has a preview of the book here.

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on February 17, 2010 2:28 AM

“When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

- From “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” a pretty amazing and beautiful article in Esquire.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net reblog, on February 16, 2010 10:01 PM

And by "screw" I mean "forcibly reassign a subdomain," which is basically disemboweling a blogger's very soul because it changes his web address and renames him. Worse than the subdomain swap, however, is how childishly Tumblr handled it.

With some choice missteps from Tumblr Director of Operations Meaghan O'Connell (pictured above via), the usually user-friendly microblog platform is facing user insurrection. Here's how it went down:

• Pitchfork magazine decides it would like to own pitchfork.tumblr.com. Though the domain is already owned, it has not been active since November. Here's Pitchfork's explanation of what happened next:

  Pitchfork emailed Tumblr the other day to ask how we would go about securing those URLs to use them for our publication. [...] Within 10 minutes, a tumblr representative responded: "Hi, Megan. Those URLs are now free. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with. Thanks for using Tumblr!"

• Meaghan celebrates Pitchfork's first post with a tweet.
• 
  
• The person who ran the original pitchfork.tumblr.com discovers that he has been moved to pitchfork1.tumblr.com, and says the handful of posts he wrote are gone. He writes about it on a separate Tumblr account, where he goes by Tumbledore. The post receives 580 reblogs and "likes," which is the Tumblr equivalent of a Million Man March.
• 
  
• The shitshow begins. Meaghan accuses Tumbledore of lying. She does line-by-line refutation of his claims.
  

  Actually when Tumblr released the domain to Pitchfork Media, pitchfork.tumblr.com was completely dormant and empty. There were not "several posts," on that account, there were zero.

  As per our policy, we emailed this account's address to inquire about the dormant account. After you failed to respond for 72 hours, we released the domain.

• Tumbledore accuses Meaghan of "libel" and posts an email correspondence with Tumblr Support that says "We didn't notify you."
  

• 
  

• Pitchfork abandons ship, subtly laying the blame with Tumblr. In a post entitled "Dear Tumblr community," Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber says Tumblr handed over the subdomain in "10 minutes" (not 72+ hours) and posts a screenshot of Tumbledore's original pitchfork.tumblr.com posts. If we believe Schreiber, then Tumbledore is telling the truth and Meaghan is not."We'll be happy to surrender the URL and find a home elsewhere if the original register of the account wishes."
• 
  
• Hipster underclass uprising: Tumblr's leadership is "full of shit" and "out to make a buck." Meaghan is "arrogant and rude." The final blow: Hipster Runoff says Tumblr is acting "like MySpace and Blogger." In other words: Corporate.
• 
  
• Meaghan psychoanalyzes her detractors' "sense of loss" in a comment to The Rumpus. She alludes to "false information" but doesn't clarify who was wrong and when.

Most remarkable about this case is how Tumblr falls on the sword of its purposefully democratic platform. Meaghan—a 24-year-old sex writer who describes herself as "fucking in love with my blog"—mixes business and pleasure on her personal blog, as is pretty common for Tumblr. When she addressed Tumbledore, her tone was that of an egoblogger settling a personal score. Likewise, her attention to detail apparently slipped, opening a window for a built-in population of factcheckers to prove her wrong, and to debate the relative willfulness of an apparent fabrication.

We asked Meaghan about Pitchforkgate's factual discrepancies, and she says she'll respond tomorrow, once she checks in with Tumblr. Pitchfork.tumblr.com currently remains in Pitchfork magazine's possession.

Originally posted by Maureen O'Connor from Gawker, on February 16, 2010 9:56 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from xkcd.com, on February 16, 2010 7:00 PM

Apparently a guy on the Norweigan curling team thought these pants were neat, and got the other guys on the team to buy them.  And then they decided they were their uniform pants.  BRAVO.

If you are on a curling team from Norway, you might as well just wear these pants.  I offer my FULL SUPPORT.

Spotted via our pal Rob Walker of the New York Times.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Put This On, on February 16, 2010 5:04 PM

It’s one of those weeks where no matter how many times you’ve seen the NY Mag cover, you pause and stare again and again.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on February 16, 2010 4:53 PM

Ha ha, oh look, it's the David Paterson story in the New York Times! You might have heard such a thing was maybe coming?

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on February 16, 2010 4:38 PM

I favorited a YouTube video: http://twitter.com/jsmooth995 aka "Why I'm Not Making a Video About John Mayer" for background info see here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/02/13/and_the_hood_pass/

Originally posted by (author unknown) from anildash's YouTube Activity, on February 16, 2010 3:02 PM

Shared by Jake Dobkin
i think "acquisition" should be in quotes in articles about this deal.

Gawker Media is making its first-ever acquisition, buying NYC-focused blog CityFile.

With the move, CityFile founder and editor Remy Stern will take over as editor-in-chief of Gawker.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Gawker Switches To Unique Visitors: The Advertisers' Preferred Stat
• THE NEW JOURNALISM: Gawker's Sports Blog Deadspin Promises More Pay-For-Sources To Crush Upstart TMZ Sports
• The Gawker Decade: How Gawker Media Defined The 2000s

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Silicon Alley Insider, on February 16, 2010 3:01 PM

Shared by Leif Hanson
great quote

the true new yorker secretly believes
that people living anywhere else
have to be, in some sense, kidding.
- john updike

Originally posted by (author unknown) from swissmiss, on February 16, 2010 2:59 PM

posted by Dave Arnold

I originally wrote this piece for a print publication, but they said the tone was too dry and axed it. They said they wanted something more like the blog. Here it is on the blog.

Heavy Metal

Cast Iron Intro:

While cast-iron cookware has been available for centuries, the advent of industrialized factory production in the mid 1800’s allowed cast iron to become widely available. The cast-iron skillet quickly became an icon of American cooking. Cast iron could be cheaply produced with minimum tooling in a wide variety of shapes –waffle irons, corn-shaped muffin pans, dutch ovens (dutch meaning “fake”, not “from Holland”), and skillets of every size. While many of these manufacturing advantages have since been supplanted, cast iron’s characteristic properties make it an excellent cookware choice in the modern kitchen. Corn bread made the classic way, in a pre-heated cast iron skillet, highlights cast iron’s cooking advantages: its temperature delivery power generates a good crust, and its temperature-regulating power provides even, constant heat –leveling out the temperature variations of your oven. The science of cast iron shows how these advantages work.

Cast Iron as a Pan Material:

The popular wisdom that cast iron cookware provides even heat is misleading. A cast iron skillet placed on a gas burner will develop distinct hot spots where the flame touches the pan. If you heat the center of a cast iron pan you will find that the heat travels slowly towards the pan’s edge, with a significant temperature gradient between the center and the edge. The pan will heat very unevenly, because cast iron is a relatively poor heat conductor compared to materials like aluminum and copper. An aluminum pan will heat more evenly because heat travels quickly across aluminum. Because of poor heat conduction, undersized burners are incompatible with cast iron cooking. The edges of a large cast iron pan will never get hot on a tiny burner. On properly sized burners you can minimize hot spots by heating slowly, but the best way to evenly heat cast iron is in the oven.

Sprinkling flour onto pans allows us to check their heating patterns. Just sprinkle with flour and heat. This is a variation on the technique Harold McGee uses. He puts paper in the bottom of a pan, covers the paper with beans, turns on the heat and makes a permanent print of the pan's heating pattern.

A flour-dusted cast-iron pan being heated on a high output burner. Notice the intensity of the hot spot and how uneven the browning is.

The mainly aluminum All-Clad has a much more even heat pattern on the same burner.

The cast-iron pan also shows some serious un-evenness on our induction burner.

The aluminum is more even than the cast-iron, but still not great. The induction burner's element is too small. Even a good conductor can't make up for a burner that is too small.

Cast iron has a much higher heat capacity than aluminum or copper, so it takes much more energy to heat a pound of cast iron to a given temperature than a pound of aluminum or copper. More energy is stored in each pound of the cast iron. Furthermore, cast iron pans typically weigh more than the same size pan in another material, so they are storing even more energy when heated. This combination of high heat capacity and weight means that cast iron takes a long time to get hot. Once hot, however, a cast iron pan contains much more thermal energy than other pans at the same temperature — a significant cooking advantage. Cast iron has unparalleled searing power because it has a lot of available thermal energy – and unlike almost any other type of pan, cast iron pans won’t warp when left dry on a burner to heat up. Thick and heavy cast iron will remain flat and true.

Cast iron is slow to heat up, so it’s also slow to cool down. It is a good regulator. It retains its temperature longer than other materials and won’t produce temperature spikes. This behavior can be disconcerting to the uninitiated. Cooking with cast iron is more akin to driving a boat than a car: the pan doesn’t respond instantly to changes in the applied heat.

Cast Iron – the OG Non-Stick Material:

Cast iron is naturally non-stick when seasoned properly. New cast iron is anything but non-stick, and it can easily rust. Seasoning — rubbing oil or fat into the cast iron and subsequently heating it — fixes both problems. Unsaturated fats work best (unsaturated means that some of the carbons in the fatty acid chains contain reactive double bonds). Nineteenth century American cooks typically used lard because it was readily available and unsaturated enough to polymerize well, but almost any oil will work. When an unsaturated fat is heated to high temperatures, especially in the presence of a good catalyst like iron, it is broken down and oxidized, after which it polymerizes –joins into larger mega molecules the same way plastics do – and mixes with bits of carbon and other impurities. This tough, impermeable surface adheres to the pores and crevices in the cast iron as it is forming. The surface is non-stick because it is hydrophobic – it hates water. Water soluble proteins make foods stick to their pan; a hydrophobic surface prevents sticking. The bits of carbon in the seasoning may also act as an additional release agent.

Cast iron isn't the only cookware with a burnt-oil based non-stick surface. This is a Korean dolsot --hot stone bowl. I routinely heat this thing to 615 F. I love dolsots. I have 8. I did not say anything about them in this post, but I could not resist putting in a picture. Maybe I'll do a post.

There is no quick way to fully season a cast iron pan; the surface of cast iron becomes slicker and blacker the more it is used. Though most cast iron today is sold “pre-seasoned,” this cursory seasoning protects against rust, but not against sticking. A good non-stick surface forms over time, with use. The oil polymer on a well-used piece of cast iron is built of many thin layers deposited over time. Thick layers can flake off in large pieces. Thin layers will remain adhered to the pan and will slough off microscopically. A true seasoned surface will only form properly at temperatures well in excess of the 350-375 degree F temperature that some manufacturers recommend for seasoning cast iron. Low temperatures do not completely polymerize and break down oil and will leave a brown, somewhat sticky pan instead of a black, non-stick one. 400-500 degrees F is the effective range for seasoning.

Good seasoning is good protection. Both these pans received the same amount of abuse and neglect. The one on the left was newly seasoned, the one on the right is 50 years old.

Early cast iron was sold either polished or unpolished. Polished cast iron isn’t polished the way silver is, it merely has a surface that was sanded or machined to make it smoother. The polishing process reveals more of the internal pore structure of the iron, and these pores make the seasoning adhere better to the pan. Polished cast iron is slick like glass when properly seasoned. Most modern cast iron is unpolished, meaning its surface has a pebbly appearance from the grain of the mold in which it was cast. Eventually, through years of seasoning, unpolished cast iron can become extremely smooth, but never as smooth as polished cast iron. New, unpolished pans can be sanded with rough sandpaper to approximate polishing.

The bumpy, non-polished surface on the left is now standard for cast iron, older pans also came polished, like the one on the right --a much better surface.

Caring For Cast Iron:

Many cooks are unnecessarily worried about maintaining their cast iron cookware. The seasoning on a good piece of cast iron is very durable. Modern soap will not harm seasoned cast iron. Old, lye based cleaners will hurt seasoned cast iron because lye dissolves the oil-polymer. Seasoned cast iron can also tolerate gentle scrubbing with non-metallic abrasives. Vigorous washing is not recommended on new, weakly seasoned pans.

Sometimes, the surface of a cast iron pan can become damaged through abuse or neglect. In this case the pan has to be stripped down to metal and re-seasoned. The best way to remove an old or bad seasoning job is to use a fireplace or the self-clean cycle of your oven to reduce the seasoning layer to ashes. This happens around 800 degrees F.

Another good maintenance technique with cast iron is to use metal cooking implements. The gentle scraping of metal along the bottom of the pan while cooking helps to even out the surface of the seasoning and make it more durable, not less.

Cast Iron Nutrition:

Studies show that cooking in cast iron can leach iron into food. Foods that are high in moisture, very acidic, or are long-cooked leach the most. For many people the extra iron is beneficial, but for a small minority of people who are sensitive to iron it can be harmful. The most quoted study on the effects of cast iron cookware on iron levels is the July 1986 study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. The pan used in that study had only been seasoned by daily usage for a couple of weeks prior to the study. As the study pointed out, better seasoned pans leach less iron. There are no data on iron leaching in decades-old pans.

Originally posted by Dave A from Cooking Issues, on February 16, 2010 2:48 PM

Examiner column for February 17.

         Offering high school students college courses as a way to prepare them for the rigors of higher level thinking and writing, seems like a no-brainer. Yet Advanced Placement has always fought an uphill battle to gain acceptance in high schools and in the press. I’ve seen it in the three Fairfax high schools I’ve taught in, and I saw it last week in The New York Times. Why is such a successful program the target of so much negativity?

            When I started teaching high school students after ten years of college teaching, I realized that these students--only one year younger than most of the college students I’d taught--were capable of far more than was expected of them. At my first school, most students had no one in their families who had gone to college, yet they read Chaucer in Middle English and Jane Austen. They were “game” as long as my approach was laid-back and emphasized that reading was fun.

 

          My second school—America’s “Best”, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—was newly created, and thought Advanced Placement was not for all students (even though they scored 90^th percentile or higher.) There were only a few AP English sections, and when I encouraged my “Regular English 12” students to take the AP test, tongues were wagging. “She had as many students taking the test as I did—and she wasn’t even teaching AP!” (That has changed, and all seniors at TJ take the AP test now.)

            At Oakton High School, I saw the English AP program burgeon from 31 test takers when I arrived, to over 200 when I left. Most of the principals supported increasing AP offerings, and opening courses to any student. Still, it was an uphill battle, with many teachers claiming that AP “wasn’t what it used to be” before the school allowed “regular” students to enroll.

            The negativity was always a function of pettiness and jealousy, I figured, so I didn’t worry about it. But last Thursday The New York Times had an article about the annual AP Report to the Nation. Headline: “EXPANSION OF A.P. TESTS ALSO BRINGS MORE FAILURES.” That had not been my experience in Fairfax County, so I was interested in the degree of “failure.”

            In 2001 1 million AP exams were taken with a pass rate of 43%. In 2009, 2.3 million AP exams were taken with a pass rate of 39%. This is a 230% increase in numbers with a 4% increase in failure. The math: 430,000 students passed in 2001, and 897,000 students passed in 2009. If your child was one of the extra 467,000 whose scores were 3 or higher last year, you would not be looking at the 4% extra “failure” rate.

            It’s hard to accuse the media of being petty and jealous, so I can’t explain such a misleading headline. (Maybe The Times was looking for a “hook.”) But I know there are hundreds of thousands of students who benefit from AP courses and AP exams—and I would include among them the “failures” who earn 2s. I had many of them over the years, and they still came back from college to tell me that my AP class prepared them the way no “regular” course ever did.

Originally posted by Teachertalk from TeacherTalk, on February 16, 2010 12:45 PM

I've said it before, his journal is one of the best things around right now  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on February 16, 2010 10:53 AM

Photo: Reddit user Biophilia_curiosus Can't Wait Until They Find the Full-Sized Species... A Reddit.com user by the name of Biophilia_curiosus posted a few photos that he took in Indonesia. They show an amazing species of gliding lizard which basically looks like a miniature dragon. Fans of the film Avatar will be rem...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TreeHugger, on February 16, 2010 10:47 AM

From Slice

[Photograph, Robyn Lee; chart, Every Day with Rachael Ray]

If the truly pizza-mad among you haven't picked up a copy of the March issue of Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine (the one in which Ed Levine and I wrote an article bracketing out 64 pizzerias across the country), it's out on newsstands now. Additionally, the magazine's website has posted the online version here.

What you might find in that issue: That the champion pizzeria is Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix.

The final four pizzerias were Pizzeria Mozza (LA), Motorino (NYC), Great Lake (Chicago), and Pizzeria Bianco. The bracket that we posted here narrows down to only the final four. In the print version, this is so that when you turn the page, you'd be confronted with the winner there. The magazine made the call to go straight from the final quartet to the big winner.

That left some folks with the question: Who was in the championship round? It's clear that Bianco made it, but we will reveal here that Motorino was the other championship contender.

At the time we took this sort of "pizza snapshot," the pizza at Bianco was the best pizza we sampled for this mad, mad quest the magazine commissioned us for. To be clear, we ate it before Chris Bianco stepped away from day-to-day pizzamaking duties. Is it the same now that he's away? It may or may not be. (If Ms. Ray wants to send us to Phoenix again to find out, we'd welcome it.)

And that's the thing with brackets like this—just like with the Big Dance, there are so many variables involved. Take a sort of "snapshot" of the pizza scene once, and it may be completely different the next time around.

Which is to say that you haven't heard the last from us when it comes to finding great pizza, because who knows how the sands may shift or the flour may sift.

Related: Pizza Tournament Methodology Questions Answered »

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on February 16, 2010 10:45 AM

Jim Bumgardner cheats at Foursquare and he’s not ashamed to admit it. He utilized the API to see how far he could go with stealing mayorships and gaining badges.

The “Java Monkeys” [user] got the biggest reactions. Foursquare users get far more irate when they lose mayorship of a Starbucks, as compared to a Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. People are much more attached to the small places they visit over and over, and have some personal investment in. The smaller the venue, the bigger the value.

Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/02/mayor_of_the_north_pole.php

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on February 16, 2010 10:20 AM

Shared by sippey
I wish I had done this.

I’ve been blatantly cheating at foursquare for the past week. I didn’t mean to start the week this way. Most of my friends know me as a responsible father who occasionally plays at local open mics, and makes puzzles.

Last Sunday, while checking into the Hill Street Cafe in Burbank using the foursquare iPhone app, I idly wondered, “Can I become the mayor of the North Pole?” So I tried checking into a nearby business. It worked. I tried one about 5 miles away. It worked. I tried Disneyland, which is about an hour away. It didn’t work, but I now had an afternoon hacking project.

When I got home, I looked to see if foursquare had an api. They did. So I found a venue that was close to the North Pole, the “Top of the World” hotel in Barrow Alaska, and checked myself into it. This can be readily done on the command line using the curl program, like so:

curl -u EMAIL:PASSWORD -d “vid=993842″ http://api.foursquare.com/v1/checkin

Try it! You’ll need to substitute in your own email and password. 993842 is the venue id of the “Top of the World” hotel, as can be seen in the URL of this page:

http://foursquare.com/venue/993842

This venue wasn’t actually in foursquare’s database, so I added it, using the ‘addvenue’ call. I also added a venue for the actual north pole. It turns out it’s much easier to become the mayor of something if nobody else has ever checked into it.

http://foursquare.com/venue/995274

Ultimately, I ended up adding a lot of venues. I used Google Earth to create KML files of interesting venues, and wrote a script to import them into foursquare, one by one. I did the same thing with Yelp. I found that foursquare would rate-limit me if I added them too quickly, so I added them 2 and a half minutes apart. Later, I found that by rotating among multiple accounts to add venues, I could add them much more quickly.

At some point last week, I devolved into a 12 year old hacker, and I spent the entire week abusing the system with a set of scripts operating fake accounts. Not only did I add fake places like the North Pole, but I started persistently checking into real places, like the Statue of Liberty. What can I say? It was fun, and foursquare’s incentives (badges and mayorships) spurred me on.

Eventually I amassed a huge number of mayorships, spread among multiple accounts, including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, as can be seen in the above screen snapshot.

I wrote a script that would walk thru a list of venue id’s, and check into them one by one. Then I created about 20 fake foursquare accounts, and had them take over different territories.

I created 5 “java monkeys” which took over about 120 different Starbucks in different regions. I identified and targeted hotly contested Starbucks by searching Twitter for recent oustings. My script automatically visited those ones.

I created a fake Martha Stewart who checks into dollar stores and pawnshops when not visiting Martha Stewart Omnimedia and the set of her TV Show.

I created a fake Simon Cowell who visits massage parlors and gets lunch at Hotdog on a Stick when not visiting the Kodak theater.

I created a fake Tommy Chong who is mayor of 130 cannabis clinics.

I created a fake Sammy Davis Jr who checks into casinos and bars in Las Vegas.

I created a “random nerd” who checked into a number of large campuses in the Silicon Valley.

The “Java Monkeys” got the biggest reactions. Foursquare users get far more irate when they lose mayorship of a Starbucks, as compared to a Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. People are much more attached to the small places they visit over and over, and have some personal investment in. The smaller the venue, the bigger the value.

I started collecting badges as well, by checking into places that have tags like “karaoke”, “photo booth”, “gym” and so on.

I was able to get a swarm badge by monitoring Twitter for when a particular location got up to 40 check-ins (this happens at a couple of Tokyo train stations quite regularly) and then checking-in all my accounts at once to trigger a swarm (which occurs at 50 check-ins). This RSS feed is useful for detecting impending swarms.

Finally, I started giving people free sailboats. I found that if you checked into a venue tagged “boat,” you automatically get the “I’m on a boat” badge. So I started identifying high-traffic places via the above Twitter search, and then adding the tag “boat”. Suddenly, visitors to metropolitan airports and various sports arenas got free sailboats for Valentine’s Day.

My juvenile crime spree is now over, and I’ve “laundered” my foursquare account, by creating a new one. This URL used to go to the account that stole the Statue of Liberty, but now it goes to a new account, because foursquare allows you to reassign twitter accounts, and constructs the URL using your active twitter account.

This is my original account, which is now inactive.

It seems clear that foursquare is going to have some massive authentication issues to deal with if they are going to grow larger than their current size. Things they probably will need to start doing include:

1) Providing additional measures to detect that people actually are where they say they are. I imagine this is not an easy problem to solve. Just because I send you a set of coordinates doesn’t mean I’m actually there. At a minimum, they can measure the time of travel between successive check-ins. If I’m traveling faster than the speed of sound, something is clearly up.

2) Making it less easy to create fake accounts. Right now, there’s not even a Captcha.

3) Not assigning the permanent URL of an account to a twitter account (which can be transferred to a different foursquare account). This provides a method of “laundering” accounts.

More generally, I think the combination of a poorly moderated and insecure folksonomy with incentives (e.g. badges, mayorships, free meals, etc.) is a fragile one. The greater the incentives, the greater the motiviation for cheating.

As it stands right now, foursquare has quite a few holes. If I were a restaurateur or coffee shop owner, I would be very wary of giving free meals or lattes to foursquare mayors, unless the employees know the mayor by sight.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from KrazyDad, on February 16, 2010 10:08 AM

reminds me of CD-ROM magazines of the mid-1990s  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on February 16, 2010 9:57 AM

$1.99, cheap [via] 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on February 16, 2010 9:50 AM

Just bought a iPod Touch 32G edition. It has safari browser. I use it to browse one of my Blog powered by WordPress. The text and images are so small. I know I can enlarge them by two fingers, but it is still has width problem.

I thought it must be some plugin can do it to make a blog mobile.

I did a google search and find this one: WordPress Mobile Pack
I install it on the backend of WordPress.

Just a few clicks to config it and it works.
I went to my blog. Wordpress detected my browser and knew it is from an hand held device. So it gave the mobile version of Blog.

It is perfect. I don't need to setup an separated domain for mobile device. Just like some site named as m.example.com. The regular site domain is www.example.com.

The configuration steps as below.

0) Installation and enabled

1) Appearance >> Mobile Switcher
I use browser detection.

2) Appearance >> Mobile theme and Mobile Widgets
I leave them default.

3) Tools >> Mobile Analytics
It has an analytics to tell how much traffic from mobile device from all visitors.

4) Settings >> mpexo
I leave it default without enable it.

Easy and Good plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

Originally posted by David Yin from David Yin's Blog, on February 16, 2010 8:55 AM

In a post to his blog for ESPN.com, Buster Olney outlines the best-case scenario for each team in baseball, which he describes for the Mets as:

“The key guys - Johan Santana, Jose Reyes, David Wright, Francisco Rodriguez - all stay healthy, and Carlos Beltran comes back in May and stays on the field… The Mets regular catcher - whoever that turns out to be - has a surprisingly good season… Luis Castillo replicates his play of 2009… And above all else, Oliver Perez goes back to being the lefty with dominant stuff.”

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on February 16, 2010 8:40 AM

manuel’s cyberlisp at master – GitHub – "A Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler"

Originally posted by erik from eriksmartt.com/blog, on February 16, 2010 8:00 AM

A Commodore 64 emulator written in Javascript (and another). It joins the Game Boy emulator and the Nintendo emulator. Oh Javascript, is there anything you can't do? (via @anildash)

Tags: Commodore 64   Javascript

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on February 16, 2010 7:49 AM

tumbledore:

I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com. Where my blog once stood now stands the official Tumblr for Pitchfork Media Inc. Watch out, Soup, I hear Campbell’s is gunning for you next.

Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting. That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc. Keep in mind that the word “pitchfork” is not a proprietary name, it is a noun dating back to the year 1364, so they had no legal right to the word or the subdomain. It clearly wasn’t a case of impersonation as none of my posts had anything to do with music. If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank. Is it possible there’s a certain amount of time that can pass between posts before Tumblr deletes your blog? If so, they should probably make that information public just in case someone accidentally makes the mistake of going on vacation.

The worst part of all this is that if you subscribe to the RSS feed for the “new” Pitchfork Tumblr (http://pitchfork.tumblr.com/rss), you’ll see the first five posts I made are still there! There’s even a post with a screenshot from my March Madness pool standings with my name and face on it. Sadly, I apparently no longer control this image or this information, nor can I exercise my right to remove it from the Internet. But hey, it’s not like these amateurs haven’t pulled this crap before, they’ll probably just write some new content policy after the fact in order to justify it like last time.

So make sure you back up all your content!

If you think your content shouldn’t be deleted and moved arbitrarily at the whims of corporate latecomers, then you should consider contacting the Tumblr team to ask them to stop disrespecting their loyal users:

Email support@tumblr.com and or call them out on Twitter

#NoBloodForIndieMusic #MemesNotBombs #TumblrPitchforkedMeLikeABaleOfHay

Haha, I love that in the Tumblrverse, Pitchfork is “the man”. Still, this is total bullshit.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Blaggazine, on February 16, 2010 7:46 AM

Emily Gould's home cooking and book chat show, produced and edited by Val Temple, gets a visit from Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia and the new Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession.

Originally posted by Emily Gould from The Awl, on February 16, 2010 7:10 AM

I'm not sure whether these are in any way affiliated with the original Nerd Merit badges, but someone's produced a (n unofficial?) collection of Foursquare achievements as merit badges.

 

So gorgeous! I love this idea. I wear a Brownies computer badge from the 70s, but imagine the games and worlds you could collect realworld merit badges from. I'd be like that kid in Up.

Foursquare.

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on February 16, 2010 7:03 AM

I'm doing a number of presentations and public appearances over the next several weeks, here's a quick chronological overview if you'd like to meet up.

• The AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, this week from Feb 18-20. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the parent organization for my new project Expert Labs, so I'm extraordinarily excited to get to attend and participate in this event for the first time. Even if you're not a scientist, you can check out Family Science Days for some very cool events that are open to the public.
• Sweets and Treats on March 10 in Washington, DC. Debbie Weil's great event for bringing together DC's tech and government communities looks really promising, and that was even before I knew there was gonna be free cupcakes.
• South by Southwest in Austin, TX on March 12-16. I'm really looking forward to this — Break Bread for Brad in memory of Brad Graham on the night of the 12th, the KICK kickball game is coming back on the morning of Saturday the 13th (more about that soon!), I'll be returning to Battledecks (this time as a judge), and of course all the usual Austin festivities.
• Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored conference, April 21. I'd be excited just to attend this one — it's even more thrilling to get to present. Take a look at the lineup of speakers and I bet you'll agree.
• Gov 2.0 Expo, May 25-27. I can already tell there's been a huge shift in the conversation about how government and technology relate, and if last fall's Gov 2.0 Summit was a watershed moment, this might be even more of a milestone.

And, if you can't make it to any of those events, I'll be doing a few things online, such as this career event about looking at your job skills in the context of Last Year's Model. I'll likely be adding in a few additional events, including Chicago in early March, which I'm hoping will let me meet even more of you. Oh, and of course I'll be blogging here as well, if you really don't feel like going anywhere.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on February 16, 2010 6:33 AM

Typeface: Vitesse

Wired gets it. Today they’re going public with the prototype they shared with us a few weeks ago, and if you’re like me, your reaction will be an instantaneous “neat!” followed immediately by “well, isn’t it obvious it was supposed to work this way?” When something creates and fulfills expectations at the same time, you know you’ve got it right. —JH

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on February 16, 2010 6:00 AM

I would never call you a freak. :) I’d be insanely flattered, but I couldn’t say I’d have dinner with you in a romantic way, but we could definitely be friends. :)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on February 16, 2010 5:50 AM

From Slice

It seems there's been a lot of buzz about pizza stones in Serious Eats Talk lately (Aaaargh, Pizza Stone!, Pizza at Home, Using a Pizza Stone, How to Clean a Pizza Stone). My take on pizza stones has always been to pick up a purpose-built one when they're on sale.* Mostly because I get confused at the home centers when I go in to find the appropriate tiles that kitchen-hackers recommend.

No more. Blake Royer of The Paupered Chef has some useful tips on finding just the right tiles to get you baking on the cheap — all for no more than $3.

His advice:

• The tiles have to be unglazed
• Quarry tiles is another name for them, and they look like terra-cotta pots
• They should be among the cheapest tiles in the store

He picked up his six tiles (to make a rectangular surface, better for sliding pizza onto than the circular purpose-built stones) at Home Depot for $2.98.

*Luckily, I haven't had to buy one in a while. My latest one, purchased almost 10 years ago, has held up perfectly. Of course, now it's going to jinx-break next time I fire up the oven.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on February 16, 2010 5:30 AM

“I got a little nervous when I heard he would be watching my bullpen session,” John Maine told David Waldstein of the New York Times, “and then I didn’t have a good one.  But needless to say, it’s an extreme honor to have him around.”

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on February 16, 2010 5:15 AM

Instapaper is a one-person operation, and all of its development needs to fit into my free time. I originally made it for myself, because I had a need for it, and I didn’t even tell anyone else about it for months. It ended up being useful to other people, but that was a fortunate side effect. When it came time to make an iPhone app, I made my own dream app to satisfy my needs, and the same thing happened: it was adopted by other people who had the same needs. This development and feedback pattern has a number of interesting side effects and corollaries.

I use every new feature myself in a long test cycles — often weeks or months — before deciding whether to release it. I rarely use other beta testers, only bringing a handful of people into testing before major releases or major changes to the storage engine, and they never see features that I haven’t already been using for a while.

Major features only get developed if I want to use them. And, correspondingly, features I’ll never use are unlikely to be implemented.

Features that I don’t personally believe in are unlikely to see the light of day, such as an unread-count icon badge. I believe unread-count badges signify unseen items with some degree of urgency or time significance that were triggered by other people or external events. Instapaper articles are added by you, aren’t urgent, and in most cases, have been seen already (when you chose to read them and clicked Read Later).

Or tags. I don’t use tags. In anything. There are a lot of fundamental organizational and practical problems with tags for which I’ve yet to see a great solution. I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot (which is why the RSS folders are so limited).

Or full-screen reading, in which you tap to temporarily show the toolbars, then they fade out after a few seconds or when you tap again. Using this feature in other apps annoys me (except Photos, in which the benefit is immense and the required toolbar interaction is minimal) because it has a very high error rate: I frequently need to tap twice to show the toolbars, and I frequently invoke the toolbars accidentally while trying to do something else, like scroll. It’s the same reason I don’t enable tap-to-click on laptop trackpads: unreliable and unintentional behavior, leading to frustration and mistrust. Instead of implementing full-screen reading, I just keep the required controls as small and simple as possible on the reading screen.

This also applies to feature removals: I’ve removed Graphical Mode from the next release. I never use it because the experience of reading with it is awful. It’s one of those features that people say they want until they actually use it and realize that it’s not worthwhile at all. (Like comments. See: customers shooting themselves in the foot.) When I asked my users if they’d miss Graphical Mode, hundreds of people told me that they never used it. Only two — literally, two, out of hundreds — said they’d miss it, but only occasionally. So I’m replacing it with a much more useful feature: an in-app browser that can be used to view full-layout pages (online only, like Safari), but will be useful in Instapaper for many other reasons as well.

I can’t imagine getting to a point where I’d want to survey my users to decide which features I should implement, or let people vote on features to “buy” their implementations. (This is why I fundamentally dislike the premise of UserVoice.) People like Instapaper because of the features it has now and the way they’re designed into the app. If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.

By listening too much to outside suggestions, I’d destroy the very reason why I’m receiving them.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on February 16, 2010 5:05 AM

I do wonder a little what happens to Lost's ratings tonight when all the homosexuals suddenly disappear to watch Johnny. (Although homosexuals are historically underrepresented in Nielsen households, obviously!) Anyway—we don't care if tonight's the night that Hurley finally dies. See you next week, eternally irritating TV show!

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on February 16, 2010 4:55 AM

I'd be happy to be wrong, because it would be pretty crazy, but rumors that Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are planning a remake of Taxi Driver with Lars von Trier should be viewed with extreme skepticism if not outright disbelief. Here are some words and phrases that might help you reach the same conclusion: "it is being suggested," "is said to be," "remains to be seen," "he may now feel," "neither confirmed nor denied," "Lars von Trier," and "the prospect… has been discussed enthusiastically."

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on February 16, 2010 4:15 AM

This pup may really want those garlic fries, but that wouldn't be a good idea.
Image: Alaina B.

Today we introduce our pawesome Pet Rx vet column. We're honored to have Brooklyn veterinarian, Dr. Eliza Lischin, on call to answer all your medical questions. As with anything you read here on Pawesome, please consult your veterinarian before you do anything with your pet that you're not sure about. 

Garlic can be super yummy, but is it safe for pets? 

If you do a simple internet search you'll come across a lot of contradictory information about the stinky rose. Some pet owners swear by it for its parasite control and immune system stimulation, while others say it's a deadly killer. My stance is somewhere in between. 

The important factors to remember are dose and frequency -- as with most things, the key is moderation.

Garlic is a close relative to the onion, both are members of the Lily Family and belong to the species allium. Each contains a substance called thiosulphate, which dogs and cats lack the enzyme to break down properly. Thiosulphate causes oxidative damage to red blood cells in both animals, which in turn triggers the body to reject those cells from the bloodstream. The result can be severe anemia and, if untreated, possibly death. Before you go turning your home into a vampire friendly hot spot know that while thiosulphate concentrations are high in onions, they are much smaller in garlic, but the true toxic dose of garlic in pets is unknown. 

One study showed that it would take five grams of garlic per kilogram of body weight to cause problems in your pet. One clove of garlic weighs just a single gram, so that means you'd have to feed a 50 pound dog 100 cloves of garlic for there to be a problem. That’s a lot of garlic! 

The tricky part of this equation however is that smaller amounts fed over time can also cause toxicity. Cats and small dogs have been found to be the most sensitive to the toxic effects of garlic. So, should you be worried if your dog or cat food has garlic listed in the ingredients? Probably not. The trace amounts of garlic found in some premium commercial pet foods have not been shown to cause any problems. They are safe for otherwise healthy pets. 

That being said, since the toxic dose is unknown, I would err on the side of caution and advise against further supplementing garlic into your pet's diet. This especially holds true for any animals already anemic, young puppies or kittens less than 8 weeks old, pregnant animals, or animals about to undergo surgery. Please be aware of the signs of potential garlic toxicity, which include vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, lethargy, discolored urine, difficulty breathing, pale gums, and increased heart rate. For those hoping to control parasites, there has been no scientific evidence proving that garlic does anything to nip parasites in the bud, though there are many safe and veterinary recommended alternatives that do.

If you are giving garlic to your pet contact your veterinarian to discuss the dose and frequency and your reasons for doing so. Since every dog and cat is different your veterinarian can help you determine what is best for your pets health.

Got a question you'd like Dr. Lischin to answer for you? Email us and we may feature the answer in an upcoming Pet Rx post.

Originally posted by sonia zjawinski from Pawesome, on February 16, 2010 4:00 AM

Let me begin by saying that I endeavored initially to get this working with Google Chrome (my main browser these days), but because Chrome’s AppleScript support currently is very minimal, it just wasn’t possible. In light of that I chose to at least proof-of-concept the idea with Safari/WebKit so that I can later use this post to inform my solution for Chrome (and so others can take advantage of this now if they happen to use Safari).

A few weeks ago I decided I had to have support for Markdown syntax highlighting in my blogging client, which at the time (and for many years prior) was MarsEdit. After coming to terms with the fact that such highlighting just wasn’t going to happen in MarsEdit (any time soon), I set out to find another solution, and quickly remembered that TextMate (which may be my favorite application of all time) came out with a blogging bundle many years ago. After watching the screencast, running some tests and creating a couple of blogging templates, I very quickly was using TextMate to write and publish.

Doing all of my blogging with TextMate these past few weeks has been great, except for one terribly annoying thing, namely the inability to quickly conjure up a bit. I was having to manually — *gasp* — create these (usually) quick, simple posts. I don’t necessarily need speed when starting long-form blog posts like the one you’re currently reading, but for the more frequent “bits” I definitely do. I need/want something that amounts to little more than a keyboard shortcut. MarsEdit has spoiled me over the years with its simple bookmarklet that grabs the data I need (i.e., page title, page URI and any currently-selected text), drops it into a new post (see my MarsEdit template below, formatted for Markdown) and populates the Title field with the title of the page.

[pageTitle](pageURI).

> selectedText

(Via []().)

Obviously then I wanted an equal or less amount of friction when doing similar operations via TextMate. (For long-form stuff I created a new blogging template that has all the fields I need for a non-bit post, so I can just go to File → New From Template → Blogging → Blog when I want to start writing a longer piece). While I was able to get some of the aforementioned bookmarklet’s functionality in Chrome via a combination of (a service using) Automator and AppleScript (i.e., Service receives selected text in Google Chrome together with some AppleScript to act on the selected text), it was limited to just the highlighted text (i.e., no page title, URI, etc.), which made the process only slightly better (if not worse) than just doing everything manually. It was at this point I resigned trying to get this to work with Chrome and moved on to Safari/WebKit.

Because Safari’s AppleScript support allows you to run JavaScript, getting the three data elements I wanted was quite easy. To wit:

tell application "WebKit"
    set selectedText to (do JavaScript "(getSelection())" in document 1)
    set pageURI to (get URL of document 1)
    set pageTitle to (do JavaScript "document.title" in document 1)
end tell

(Note: if you use Safari you’ll want to change “WebKit” to “Safari.”)

Once I had the critical information, I needed to figure out how to get all of it into a new post within TextMate. If you watched the blogging bundle screencast or previously have blogged with TextMate, you know that various post-specific elements are set in a “header” at the top of each file (where each file corresponds to a particular post). For my bits, this header looks like the following:

Title:
Slug: 
Pings: Off
Comments: Off
Category: bits

To automate the inclusion of these headers in a new file (to be created when the script is set in motion), I had to create a new template for the blogging bundle (Bundles → Bundle Editor → Show Bundle Editor). (You can use the blogging templates that exist already as guides to creating your own.) After setting that up, I whipped up the following code to “click” on the correct menu item within TextMate so that a new file gets created using the new template.

tell application "TextMate"
    activate
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "TextMate"
            tell menu bar 1
                tell menu bar item "File"
                    tell menu "File"
                        tell menu item "New From Template"
                            tell menu "New From Template"
                                tell menu item "Blogging"
                                    tell menu "Blogging"
                                        click menu item "Template"
                                    end tell
                                end tell
                            end tell
                        end tell
                    end tell
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

(“Template” in the above code is whatever you named the template you created.) It’s ugly, I know, but it gets the job done (and besides, I ended up not using it; keep reading). Now, each time I invoke the script I get a new file with proper headers and set to the desired bundle type (in my case, Markdown). However, I ran into a slight problem when attempting to insert the title, URI and selected text at their correct positions within the file (e.g., pageTitle should be inserted as so: “Title: pageTitle”). I tried using AppleScript to move around within the document (using variations on the code below, which was to move the cursor to the right by seven spaces), but no dice. I struggled for a while with this and ultimately just had to convince myself that a solution probably wasn’t worth the time (though I’m certain it’s possible)

repeat 7 times
    keystroke (ASCII character 129) using command down
end repeat

In light of my unsuccessful cursor positioning, I attempted to tackle the problem from another angle, and decided I could just create the headers with AppleScript instead of relying on the template from the blogging bundle. At this point there were three ways to move forward: 1) create a blank template and use it as described above (minus headers); 2) use TextMate’s built-in URL scheme that allows you to open local files with TextMate from within other applications (e.g., Safari via AppleScript); or 3) use AppleScript to cause TextMate to open a local file directly.

Option 1 should be fairly self-explanatory given the discussion so far. For option 2 you’ll want to tell Safari to run the following command within your script.

open location "txmt://open/?url=file://~/path/to/local/file"

The “local” file referenced above is one you will have created and saved, and to which you will have assigned the desired bundle type so that the syntax highlighting is correct. You’ll want to keep this file empty, because each time you invoke your script the proper headers and other relevant information will be auto-inserted. In my case, I never need to save this file (i.e., when creating a new post) because I’m only using this setup for my bits, which I publish almost as soon as I create; given this, the file always is blank, and therefore ready to receive the stuff I want to insert.

Option 3 is the route I chose for my implementation, because it’s the most straightforward (and because option 2 creates a new blank tab that I didn’t feel like figuring out how to kill). With option 3 you simply tell TextMate to open the local file.

open "/path/to/local/file"

At this point all that was left to figure out was how to actually insert the headers and all of the information grabbed using JavaScript (discussed at the beginning of this piece). It ended up being rather trivial and is shown below as part of the “complete” AppleScript file, which you should be able to use outright (being sure, of course, to change the open file path).

tell application "WebKit"
    set selectedText to (do JavaScript "(getSelection())" in document 1)
    set pageURI to (get URL of document 1)
    set pageTitle to (do JavaScript "document.title" in document 1)
end tell

property LF : ASCII character 10

tell application "TextMate"
    activate
    open "/path/to/local/file"
    set post to "Title: " & pageTitle & LF
    set post to post & "Slug: " & LF
    set post to post & "Pings: Off" & LF
    set post to post & "Comments: Off" & LF
    set post to post & "Category: posts" & LF & LF
    set post to post & "[" & pageTitle & "]"
    set post to post & "(" & pageURI & ")." & LF & LF
    set post to post & "> " & selectedText & LF
    insert post
end tell

(“LF” corresponds to the Unix linefeed character.)

I launch the script using FastScripts (specifically, I use ⌥B), but obviously you can just access the Script menu in the menu bar if you’re OK with being a little less efficient.  ;)

As I noted at the beginning of this piece, this solution works beautifully in Safari/WebKit, but I currently use Chrome. Hopefully Chrome’s AppleScript support soon will be as robust as Safari’s, but something tells me that that probably is the last thing on the team’s mind right now. If and when sufficient support is there, I’ll be sure to update this code and this post.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on February 16, 2010 12:30 AM

The Core Data Programming Guide clearly states that Core Data is not a database but since both Core Data and a database are ways of providing searchable, persistent storage, exactly how and why they are different may not be clear. In this post, I'll look at the way Core Data works and the reasons why its features and capabilities are different to those of common SQL databases — even though an SQL database may be used as the backing store.

Introduction

Both Core Data and an SQL database provide a means of persistently storing structured data in a searchable store.

Since programmers are generally familiar with databases and since Core Data is actually backed by an SQLite database, it is understandable that Core Data is often treated and used as though it were a wrapper around SQLite.

It is important to realize that although you can use Core Data in this way (in fact, it works very well like this), that Core Data actually operates over a different domain to SQLite — meaning that it provides lots of services that SQLite doesn't but also that Core Data can't provide some of the services that SQLite can. Even for services that both technologies provide, there are different performance considerations.

Primary function of a database

The somewhat narrow description of database that I will use is: persistent and searchable storage for data in table, row, column format where the primary goal is to keep the data up-to-date on disk at all times. There are lots of database implementations and many provide features far beyond this description but I'm really looking at the key components of a straightforward MySQL-style database implementation with which many programmers are familiar.

Despite many databases being called "relational" — which seemingly implies that they have a degree of support for object connectivity — relational databases don't handle the mechanics of connecting objects. Maintaining state (like a an object relation) between columns, rows or tables is left to the user of the database. A database is "dumb" storage — rows have few behaviors beyond "read" and "write" and extending or customizing their behavior would involve extending the database system itself.

Primary function of Core Data

At its heart, Core Data is an object graph manager — with most of its other features (including saving objects to disk) existing as supporting functions for the objects in the graph.

In the case of Core Data, object graph management means that you can connect object A to object B and connection at both the A and B ends is kept perpetually in sync. If you delete or change the connection at the A end, the B end will be updated.

The management of the graph is handled by the objects themselves. All Core Data objects are fully instantiated Objective-C objects — which means that their properties and behaviors are achieved through methods and are observable and overrideable.

These fully instantiated objects require that the object graph be in-memory — at least while the data is updated. For Core Data this isn't a problem: its primary domain is in-memory objects.

With regards to how Core Data instantiated objects are tracked in memory: without access to the source code, it's not entirely clear. We can only assume that the NSManagedObjectContext tracks instantiated objects in a heap or structured container of some form so that it can find them again. This tracking structure may behave a bit like an in-memory database but it would only be for tracking the existence of instantiated objects — it would not itself store any data. Also note that the centralized NSManagedObjectContext (and any structures it might maintain) is not how you interact with instantiated NSManagedObjects — you interact with an NSManagedObject by sending messages to NSManagedObject pointers.

Databases and object graph management are not inherently exclusive

There are other object graph management frameworks that work similarly to Core Data but which try to behave as an atomic, transactional database. To update the object graph, these frameworks must:

• load appropriate rows from a database
• instantiate objects from these rows
• make changes to the graph objects that are now in memory
• commit the changes back to the database

To be properly atomic, these steps must all be performed as a single transaction (with no other reads or write to the affected rows during the transaction). While some systems might require this, it is far too slow for a general object graph system.

Core Data does not follow this model as Core Data aims to be a more general object management system — and that means that it needs far better performance and flexibility than this model would allow.

Operating in-memory versus an on-disk database

The reason that Core Data focuses on an in-memory representation is speed. For object graph changes that affect multiple objects, it is much faster if they are all in memory already, rather than needing to search for them again in the database.

For temporary objects (data that doesn't have to be saved to disk) Core Data can create, change and manipulate objects much faster than SQLite can since SQLite has to update indexes and update nodes in the B-tree, as well as simply allocating space and setting values. Core Data can allocate millions of objects in a few seconds, where SQLite might take a few minutes for the same number of allocations.

The tradeoff with an in-memory approach is that SQLite is still used as the backing store. Reading from disk and saving to disk involves all of SQLite's overheads plus the overhead of the Core Data to SQLite conversion process — so is invariably slower than SQLite alone.

Common database tasks that Core Data doesn't do

I've spoken about features that Core Data has that databases do not. It is important to consider some of the features that Core Data's approach lacks with respect to a database.

Core Data cannot operate on data without loading the data into memory

In SQL you can simply "DROP tableName" to delete whole tables or update every column of a table with commands like "UPDATE tableName SET key1 = value WHERE key2 = otherValue". These commands can efficiently update vast amounts of data because they only need to load small amounts of data into RAM at any given time.

Core Data doesn't work in this perpetually on-disk manner — it only works on objects in memory. Even if you only want to delete an object, it must be loaded and instantiated in RAM.

Of course, this is necessary because the object, and its potentially overridden behaviors must be loaded and invoked. There are also connections to be kept up to date with other objects.

However this constraint has implications: if you're trying to change huge numbers of objects (tens of thousands or more) you will need to consider keeping your memory footprint down. This can be done by periodically refaulting unchanged values (refreshObject:mergeChanges:) or avoiding the fetch of an object's data (setIncludesPropertyValues:NO on NSFetchRequest) or even saving the whole context and releasing all the objects you're holding.

Core Data does not handle data logic

There are a few data-related features that SQL contains, a good example being "unique" keys, that Core Data does not include.

There are a couple of technical reasons why this might be the case. Subclasses can override the getter and setter for an attribute to the point where it is unclear whether it is or is not unique. In fact, transient Core Data attributes need not even support isEqual:.

However, I suspect the distinction is actually that Core Data offers no real support for attribute behaviors at all. Core Data manages the "graph" (connections) but the data attributes are all the responsibility of the business logic in the rest of the program; convenient as it may be, it falls outside Core Data's conceptual domain.

Multi-threaded, multi-user scenarios

Core Data does not offer any amount of threading support. To be fair, SQLite is single threaded too but many other databases are multi-threaded and multi-user.

Core Data has been designed for single-user environments (running inside desktop and iPhone apps). Getting rid of threading and locking makes the framework much faster and simpler to work with in its standard usage scenarios.

However, there are still situations where you will want multiple threads reading your data. NSManagedObjects and their NSManagedObjectContext should be accessed from a single thread only. If you need another thread working on the same data, you need to save the file and reopen using a different NSManagedObjectContext in the other thread.

Summary

Database	Core Data
Primary function is storing data	Primary function is graph management (although reading and writing to disk is an important supporting feature)
Operates on data stored on disk (or minimally and incrementally loaded)	Operates on objects stored in memory (although they can be lazily loaded from disk)
Stores "dumb" data	Works with fully-fledged objects that self-manage a lot of their behavior and can be subclassed and customized for further behaviors
Can be transactional, thread-safe, multi-user	Non-transactional, single threaded, single user (unless you create an entire abstraction around Core Data which provides these things)
Can drop tables and edit data without loading into memory	Only operates in memory
Perpetually saved to disk (and often crash resilient)	Requires a save process
Can be slow to create millions of new rows	Can create millions of new objects in-memory very quickly (although saving these objects will be slow)
Offers data constraints like "unique" keys	Leaves data constraints to the business logic side of the program

CocoaWithLove sponsor:
 
Find Good Stuff For Mac and iPhone Developers at The Mac Developer Network.

Originally posted by Matt Gallagher from Cocoa with Love, on February 15, 2010 10:32 PM

FanGraphs Audio is now available on iTunes! You can either search for it and it will show up under podcasts, or you can just follow this link.

Originally posted by David Appelman from FanGraphs Baseball, on February 15, 2010 8:51 PM

I’ve been blogging for over ten years (yeah the archives only go back to December 2000, but I lost some old hand-coded entries) and I feel like this is the first design I’ll be able to (intentionally) keep going for some time. I also feel like it represents who I am right now.2 If you happen to find anything that looks odd, feel free to let me know. You can find contact information on the about page or just leave a comment here. Thanks to everyone for visiting over the years. It’s been fun so far and I’m looking forward to many more years of funning with you. via www.capndesign.com Great redesign.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on February 15, 2010 8:27 PM

I’m proud to say that something I named is being discussed on MLB Network. Tom Verducci found what he called the Year After Effect and I found it, years later. After discovering I was repeating his work, I decided to start calling it the Verducci Effect. (He didn’t name it after himself.) It’s stuck and I’m glad. Verducci deserves the credit.

He was on MLB Network with Victor Rojas (FOP) discussing the reasons behind it and the pitchers to watch out for. Say what you will about MLB Network — and I do — but they’ve got the time and resources to do a lot more of this, educating people. Whether it’s injury management, WPA, or a million other things, there’s an opportunity, even if the market is small.

The video isn’t embeddable, so just click here.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on February 15, 2010 5:02 PM

Originally posted by Administrator from Turbanhead, on February 15, 2010 4:11 PM

Everyone who publishes anything (even if they don't know it) loves being mentioned on other websites. The longest time ago when I wrote a personal blog for friends about whatever came across my mind we had link sharing; you link to my blog and I'll link to yours. The practice amongst friends or readers conveyed a sense of trust in the content of the other site which was picked up on by Google and became the backbone of PageRank. So, forward ten years into the future, spammers try to increase their rank on searches by having others link to their site (or just creating lots of sites themselves and linking them all together).

People still love to be mentioned on the web and it surely says something for your own personal brand when other people see you mentioned on the web. Calling someone out on your blog is a good way to get their attention and maybe even a link back to your site. Add in some psychology that says that if you do something nice for someone else, they feel compelled to do something nice for you and you have an exploitable situation. Enter bad guys. They're thinking that if you linked to enough people from some semi-spammy site, you could get enough people to link back to you to gain some search cred.

Okay, enough theory. There's a site out there called Accredited Online Colleges (I won't link to them because I don't trust them) and they're essentially a front for another site that pushes online degree programs¹. There's lots of repetitive links and they're clearly optimized for convincing search robots that this is the place to go for an online college search. Unfortunately, they have no valuable content.

This is where our ideas behind linking to others come in. They do have a blog where they (you guessed it) link to twitterers and others sites on bombastic lists such as "100 Amazing Scientists You Should Follow On Twitter".

Yes, I am listed as an "Amazing Scientist" on that list. No, I don't think that it's a sincere appreciation of anyone on twitter.

The blog is designed to get people to link to it because people love being linked to. And it works! The bit.ly aggregate link has been clicked more than a thousand times. From all these links, they get a better search position and make more cash referring search users to the actual appropriate site. It's the classic scenario of stacking the space between manufacturer and consumer with middlemen that drive up the price (or, in this case, the clicks). It's not OK because it pollutes the web.

The scientists on twitter make for a really interesting community of people and lots of great chatting and trading of ideas goes on there. @flyingjenny is a really fascinating look into how NASA works on the inside, even moreso now that we know the fate of the Shuttle. @BadAstronomer is, well, the Bad Astronomer and you probably need no more reason than that to follow him on twitter. People that you could never even hope to communicate with on a personal level are out there, responding to tweets from regular people (@neiltyson, @garrettlisi and @seanmcarroll come to mind).

So do yourself a favor and check that link before they you link back to it... especially if it's just a passing mention of you. We're not link whores yet.

¹ Do I universally condemn online degree programs? Of course not, I'm railing against the method which this site uses to gain links and popularity, not the content itself.

Originally posted by Nick from Fine Structure, on February 15, 2010 2:13 PM

Whew. This took way too long, but here we are with a new design! I am loath to admit that I’ve been building this off and on for 2 years, but it’s true. Let me give you the rundown.

• I’ve lived with this last design for quite some time and it was getting stale. I wanted something a bit more flexible and brighter.
• I wanted a view into my social graph (i.e., everything I’ve been doing outside of this site).
• I wanted a project that would take way too long to finish and become way too complicated (not exactly true).

The Design

I’ve long pined for the beautiful structure of Khoi’s blog and the free-flowing nature of Jason’s. I’d like to think I created something original that draws from what they’ve been doing for years.

The fonts in use are FF Tisa Web Pro, FF Enzo Web and Verdana (my commitment to chunky sans-serif fonts continues in this latest iteration.). The first two are served from Typekit¹, which has been a fun experiment.

As for the colors, I just wanted something bright and fun. I tried to make use of the color as an accent instead of blinding you with a yellow background or blue body text (don’t cross me or I just might). I think the color choices are the most successful aspect of the site.

The Social Graph

Like most of you, I’ve been Twittering and Flickring for quite some time, and I wanted to get that onto the site. Sure, I could have used the widgets they provide or even the action streams provided by Movable Type, but that would have been “fast” and “easy”. So, I wrote a set of scripts that grab data, parse it and write out some interesting widgets throughout the site. Some of this stuff is a little buggy, but for the most part it turned out well.

You can see good examples of this by looking at the monthly archives, which only have data from that month, instead of just the most recent. I wanted it to be a view into what I did for the month (probably more for me than you, when I think about it). The homepage has some nice views as well. You’ll notice a graph for the top Last.fm tracks. I built that using Highcharts, which is a jQuery graphing library. I’ve been playing around with these for a few months now — mostly at work — and this one is the most full-featured. I also really like Bluff.

Since this is only bringing in data about what happened and when it happened, I’m also reviving reviews. I haven’t reviewed anything here since 2005, but that will change post haste.

The Tech

The site is powered by Movable Type 4.33, several MT plugins, jQuery, Typekit and the custom social graph scripts I wrote. While everyone else is moving to hosted blogging solutions, some of which are awesome, I’m still a tinkerer. I want to be able to dive in and play with the code. It forces me to learn new tricks, even if I occasionally have to debug an errant template.

I’m using jQuery in some fun ways around the site. You’ll notice at the bottom of the home page you can load new entries. “But Matt, how is that possible if you use a CMS that publishes static files?” Well, in MT 4.3 I helped usher in the ability to paginate entries and I thought it was only appropriate I put it in action here.

Another change is the addition of authenticated commenting and tags. You can still comment anonymously, but now Facebook, TypePad, Google and Yahoo! users can log in and keep their identities. In regards to tags, I’ve been adding them to entries for a while now, but I’ve gotten around to exposing them.

Finally, I have dropped support for IE6. Only 3% of my visitors use the browser, so sorry dudes. You’re out of luck. The site does still have some issues in IE7 and 8, but I’ll fix those over the next week or two. Ya’ll can read the content just fine, so I think we can both wait a bit.

Summing Up

I’ve been blogging for over ten years (yeah the archives only go back to December 2000, but I lost some old hand-coded entries) and I feel like this is the first design I’ll be able to (intentionally) keep going for some time. I also feel like it represents who I am right now.²

If you happen to find anything that looks odd, feel free to let me know. You can find contact information on the about page or just leave a comment here.

Thanks to everyone for visiting over the years. It’s been fun so far and I’m looking forward to many more years of funning with you.

Footnotes

1. Typekit has been fantastic, but it’s still a bit buggy. You may notice some issues here and there (especially in Internet Explorer), but I’m going to live with it. The service is run by smart people, so I’ve got confidence. ↩
2. How right now is it? The about page uses a random Flickr photo of me. That’s pretty right now, right? ↩

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on February 15, 2010 1:52 PM

Whew. This took way too long, but here we are with a new design! I am loath to admit that I’ve been building this off and on for 2 years, but it’s true. Let me give you the rundown.

• I’ve lived with this last design for quite some time and it was getting stale. I wanted something a bit more flexible and brighter.
• I wanted a view into my social graph (i.e., everything I’ve been doing outside of this site).
• I wanted a project that would take way too long to finish and become way too complicated (not exactly true).

The Design

I’ve long pined for the beautiful structure of Khoi’s blog and the free-flowing nature of Jason’s. I’d like to think I created something original that draws from what they’ve been doing for years.

The fonts in use are FF Tisa Web Pro, FF Enzo Web and Verdana (my commitment to chunky sans-serif fonts continues in this latest iteration.). The first two are served from Typekit¹, which has been a fun experiment.

As for the colors, I just wanted something bright and fun. I tried to make use of the color as an accent instead of blinding you with a yellow background or blue body text (don’t cross me or I just might). I think the color choices are the most successful aspect of the site.

The Social Graph

Like most of you, I’ve been Twittering and Flickring for quite some time, and I wanted to get that onto the site. Sure, I could have used the widgets they provide or even the action streams provided by Movable Type, but that would have been “fast” and “easy”. So, I wrote a set of scripts that grab data, parse it and write out some interesting widgets throughout the site. Some of this stuff is a little buggy, but for the most part it turned out well.

You can see good examples of this by looking at the monthly archives, which only have data from that month, instead of just the most recent. I wanted it to be a view into what I did for the month (probably more for me than you, when I think about it). The homepage has some nice views as well. You’ll notice a graph for the top Last.fm tracks. I built that using Highcharts, which is a jQuery graphing library. I’ve been playing around with these for a few months now — mostly at work — and this one is the most full-featured. I also really like Bluff.

Since this is only bringing in data about what happened and when it happened, I’m also reviving reviews. I haven’t reviewed anything here since 2005, but that will change post haste.

The Tech

The site is powered by Movable Type 4.33, several MT plugins, jQuery, Typekit and the custom social graph scripts I wrote. While everyone else is moving to hosted blogging solutions, some of which are awesome, I’m still a tinkerer. I want to be able to dive in and play with the code. It forces me to learn new tricks, even if I occasionally have to debug an errant template.

I’m using jQuery in some fun ways around the site. You’ll notice at the bottom of the home page you can load new entries. “But Matt, how is that possible if you use a CMS that publishes static files?” Well, in MT 4.3 I helped usher in the ability to paginate entries and I thought it was only appropriate I put it in action here.

Another change is the addition of authenticated commenting and tags. You can still comment anonymously, but now Facebook, TypePad, Google and Yahoo! users can log in and keep their identities. In regards to tags, I’ve been adding them to entries for a while now, but I’ve gotten around to exposing them.

Finally, I have dropped support for IE6. Only 3% of my visitors use the browser, so sorry dudes. You’re out of luck. The site does still have some issues in IE7 and 8, but I’ll fix those over the next week or two. Ya’ll can read the content just fine, so I think we can both wait a bit.

Summing Up

I’ve been blogging for over ten years (yeah the archives only go back to December 2000, but I lost some old hand-coded entries) and I feel like this is the first design I’ll be able to (intentionally) keep going for some time. I also feel like it represents who I am right now.²

If you happen to find anything that looks odd, feel free to let me know. You can find contact information on the about page or just leave a comment here.

Thanks to everyone for visiting over the years. It’s been fun so far and I’m looking forward to many more years of funning with you.

Footnotes

1. Typekit has been fantastic, but it’s still a bit buggy. You may notice some issues here and there (especially in Internet Explorer), but I’m going to live with it. The service is run by smart people, so I’ve got confidence. ↩
2. How right now is it? The about page uses a random Flickr photo of me. That’s pretty right now, right? ↩

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on February 15, 2010 1:52 PM

As a student work, I would say this one can count. Tweetcatcha [parsons.edu] visualizes the tweets resulting from the latest news articles that appeared during the last 24 hours on the New York Times website. It
uses the NYTimes Timeswire API and Twitter to discover the tweets according to the titles and URLs of recent news articles. Searching through Twitter for valid URLs was made much easier by using BackTweets, a service of BackType.

All the tweets are arranged around a set of 24 rings, one for each hour in the day. The location of a tweet is based on the time difference from the article posting to the time the tweet was created. If a tweet was posted less than an hour after the article, then it would be very close to the inner most ring, and vice versa.

Be patient, as the viz application seemingly takes a long time to load. More detailed infos at the authors' blog post.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on February 15, 2010 12:55 PM

microsoft has just released the latest version of their mobile operating system, to compete with google’s
android and apple’s iphone OS. windows phone 7 is a move away from windows previous mobile
operating system. the new system is designed with a much cleaner UI that is influenced by their zune
music player. the OS was specifically designed for interacting with social networks, as well as organizing
contacts and other information. the windows phone was also deliberately designed to break away from
the conventions of personal computers, opting instead for a  much more intimate experience that is based
around 6 hubs of activity. in addition to phone and organizing functions the system will also play xbox
live games on mobile devices. mobiles using the new windows phone OS will be released later this year.

http://www.microsoft.com

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on February 15, 2010 12:36 PM

A homebrew app for the Palm Pre reboots your phone according to a schedule.

This is such a perfectly encapsulated nutshell of exactly why Apple does not allow third-party background processes on the iPhone.

On the other hand, a Pre can play music from Pandora in the background while you do something else.

This gets right to the very heart of the old world / new world schism.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from stevenf.com, on February 15, 2010 12:29 PM

In the comments to Dave Cameron’s Joe Mauer post last week a commenter, Temo, suggested Joey Votto as a player with similar opposite-field power. I thought it would be interesting to check him out, partially as a comparison to Mauer, but also because I think Votto does not get enough attention.

Last year Votto had the fourth-highest wOBA baseball. Obviously he benefits from his home park and we do not have the wRC+ leader boards yet, but I went and checked the fifteen guys after him and saw that the only one who gets pumped ahead is Adrain Gonzalez. So on a rate basis Votto was the fifth-best hitter even taking to account his home park.

So how did he do it? It starts with a good number of walks and solid power. The power, as Temo noted, is great to left — opposite field for the left-handed Votto. To left he has an ISO of .450, but has fairly good power to center, .226, and right, .298. So he is no slouch to any field.

Just as interesting as his opposite-field power though is his amazing .373 BABIP, good for sixth best in the league. Looking at the BABAIP split out by batted-ball type the amazing thing is his BABIP on fly balls, .291. The average BABIP on fly balls in the NL in 2009 was .142. So Votto gets hits on his non-HR fiy balls at a rate double that of the average non-HR fly and higher than a good number of hitters do on all their balls in play.

How can nearly three of ten of Votto’s non-HR fly balls drop for hits? Here I look at Votto’s non-HR flies by field location. As in my Cust post, the numbers are the fractions of non-HR fly balls to each location and the color the BABIP: from red being over one half to gray being zero.

The first thing is that Votto hits very few infield flies compared to the average LHB, actually the third fewest in the league. This cuts down on automatic outs. Additionally he hits way more flies to deep and mid-distance left field, which fall in for hits at a very good rate. This shows how readily and successfully he goes the opposite way, which I think is a big reason for his high BABIP on fly balls.

He probably will not have a BABIP of over .370 next year, but it will most likely be quite high. This great BABIP coupled with his great — and opposite-field fueled — power and his walks result in one of the game’s best young hitters.

Originally posted by Dave Allen from FanGraphs Baseball, on February 15, 2010 10:32 AM

One day in the early 2000s, I received an unsolicited email from someone I didn't know; if you had an email address then, you probably did too, daily, and most of the time ignored such notes. But there's spam, and then there's spam. It began: "If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!"

And it continued:

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!!

I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age back to 4.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I was a little hurt when I discovered that the sender had a pretty long list of recipients for his note. And in the months and years that followed that email, media consolidation seemed to affect the Internet as much as it did print and broadcasting, making it harder for the average user to chance upon the thrilling manifestos of singular visionaries like my correspondent, which is why I was so excited to find The Vigilant Citizen.

The first VC post I read was a look at Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video, presented to me by the tireless content "recyclers" at Oh No They Didn't. I'd seen the video and already thought it was a fairly dark depiction of human sex trafficking (plus dance routines); little did I know it's actually about "the dark and ritualistic inner-workings of the entertainment industry."

In the first paragraph, the author refers to previous posts describing Lady Gaga as an "Illuminati Puppet," so for VC, this video fits that narrative perfectly. Gaga begins in a sensory-deprivation tank (of the sort used on victims of mind-control techniques). She's drugged (ditto). She's eventually delivered to a room in which a bed is flanked by taxidermied gazelle heads (which "symbolically refer to Baphomet, the horned idol of Western occultism"). And she doesn't set her master on fire to escape her fate as a sex slave, as it might have appeared to me: she presents him as a burnt offering to Baphomet in exchange for her fame.

Her final dance scene finds her costumed in red as a sign of her initiation into the Illuminati—and in case that sign wasn't clear enough, her "eye in the triangle" gesture should eliminate all doubt. You know, eye in the triangle? Freemasons? That thing on money? …Right?

Here's the genius of VigilantCitizen.com: it combines the urgency of apocalyptic paranoia with the eggheaded fun of semiotic analysis. Conspiracy theories are hard to resist; you probably know otherwise normal people who, despite the evidence to the contrary, believe that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the moon landing was faked, or that vaccines cause autism. Conspiracy theories involving the U.S. government are all the more believable given that it spent the 20th century screwing up its citizens both intentionally (Tuskegee syphilis experiment) and through its negligence (Love Canal). Plus there's all that business around America's founders and their connections to Freemasonry—and when you start thinking about whether Freemasons run the country, it won't be long before you're on to the Illuminati and the New World Order and the secret ways in which our government controls us without our even knowing it. Vigilant Citizen has taken this sort of thinking—popular amongst intense undergrads around 3 a.m. in a dorm common room—and turned it into an impressively detailed website.

A word about our guide. The Vigilant Citizen is, of course, anonymous. From the site's FAQ, we learn he is male; he has a fiancée; he lives in Eastern Canada; and he identifies himself as a "mystic Christian." The "About" page also informs us that he holds a B.A. in Communications and Politics, and has worked as a producer in the music industry, in which capacity he learned things about show business that the rest of us will never see: "Through my experiences and my contacts, I have discovered some of the darker aspects of the entertainment industry which I found were in direct connection with my studies in occultism. My understanding of the state of mind that prevails in the higher levels of the ladder makes it probably easier for me to decifer [sic] the symbolism in music videos than it is for everyday people."

What makes VC so fascinating to me is that even though his general point seems to be that we need to be on our guard against indoctrination by the Illuminati, so that they can't enact their plan to bring about a New World Order via mass genocide that would sufficiently thin out the world population and thus clear a path for a one-world government (obviously), his writing doesn't suggest a tremendous amount of anxiety about the imminent destruction of our freedoms or our way of life. He's way more interested in outlining the symbolic evidence for his worldview. Any number of commentators have already dealt with the various monuments in Washington, DC, and VC gives some attention to those as part of his series on "Sinister Sites" which also include the Supreme Court of Israel, Rockefeller Center and the Manitoba Legislative Building. But I'm pretty sure the only person to see Illuminati symbolism in the video for Paramore's "Brick By Boring Brick" is VC.

VC's thesis with music videos tends to be that the artist is using the medium to send viewers coded messages about the occult-tinged rituals in which he or (usually) she secretly had to participate in order to become famous. For instance: Rihanna. VC presents several recent photos in which she is covering one of her eyes, and explains: "[T]he occult meaning of hiding one's eye… can be traced back to the 'eye of Horus' of Egyptian mythology. This symbolism seems to have evolved into a kind of 'signal,' flashed by the artists who have been initiated into the select circle of Illuminati pop stars." So therefore, Rihanna's video for "Russian Roulette" isn't a stylized representation of the notion that love, like Russian roulette, is a dangerous game; it's actually a depiction of Monarch programming and Illuminati mind control. Or: Beyoncé. Her reinvention as Sasha Fierce is not just an artistic experiment or a marketing gimmick but a symbolic representation of an artist taken over by evil to obtain success. (On the related subject of Chris Gaines, VC has, so far, kept silent.)

VC is somewhat less convincing when, for example, he takes on Walt Disney's Pinocchio. For one thing, his interpretation of nearly any entertainment targeted toward children is tainted by his belief that Monarch programming, in which Disney movies or The Wizard Of Oz are used to calm mind-control subjects and induce a dissociative state, is still practiced by the Illuminati today. (It's why VC is so alarmed by Lady Gaga's video for "Paparazzi," at the end of which she's wearing sunglasses that evoke Mickey Mouse ears as she poisons and kills her lover.) In the case of Pinocchio, VC starts with the biographical detail that Carlo Collodi, author of the book on which the film is based, was an active Freemason, and uses that to inform his reading of the film. So Geppetto doesn't pray to the regular old God to make Pinocchio a real boy; he prays to "the greater God (the great Architect of the Masons)." Pinocchio's transformation into a donkey is a reference to Apuleius's Metamorphoses, "a classic work studied in Mystery schools such as Freemasonry." Also in Comp. Lit. courses in any university anywhere!

And maybe the episode in which Pinocchio ends up in Stromboli's puppet show has nothing to do with the way the Illuminati use entertainers as their "puppets"; maybe it's a way to suggest to children that it's less important to be famous than it is to be good.

This is one of the problems with VC's symbolic analysis: certainly, it is possible to read occult themes into artistic works if that's what you're looking for. But it's possible to read nearly any theme into an artistic work if you have a basic working knowledge of a culture's most enduring story elements. I'm sure Forrest Gump is beneath VC's notice, but I remember when that came out that both liberals and conservatives considered it a scathing indictment of their opponents, and both factions could use the events of the film to make convincing arguments. The reason "There's no place like home," from The Wizard Of Oz, might be used in Monarch programming (if you believe Monarch programming really happened—or is happening all around us right now) is that "There's no place like home" is a theme that goes back to The Odyssey.

VC writes: "Pinocchio went through the hardships of initiation and came out of the darkness of ignorance. He emerges from tomb [sic] resurrected, like Jesus Christ. He is now a 'real boy', an illuminated man who broke the shackles of material life to embrace his higher self." Sure—or, he undertook The Hero's Journey, which underpins nearly every work of fiction from The Aeneid to The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

But look, VC isn't trying to get an A on an English paper; he's trying to help his readers to an awareness of the ways our country's secret rulers use mass culture to control us, and he's well prepared to answer your dubious questions. Like, if all this Monarch business happens in secret to fulfill our overlords' evil ends, why would they allow hints to pervade music videos? VC answers in the FAQ:

This is a great question and it can only be explained by understanding the way the occult elite thinks. They firmly believe (as well as all ancient civilizations) that symbols can deeply affect the human psyche. Many occult exercises focus on meditation through symbols, which they believe leads to a higher state of consciousness. The same knowledge is applied to the masses through movies and videos but to attain another result: to dumb down and to deshumanize [sic]. Sounds terrible, but these are the times we live in.

So in other words, the Illuminati think we're too dumb to catch on—but the Illuminati didn't count on VC not only to find out there is an artist called Kerli (or a band?), but to submit her (their?) "Walking On Air" video to the most rigorous possible scrutiny. Foiled!

Another question: if whistleblowers in movies like The Constant Gardener and Michael Clayton end up dead, how is VC allowed to continue dropping all this truth on the Internet, exposing all these shadowy figures' nefarious plots? Well, last year he wrote about the way big-budget movies like National Treasure and Angels & Demons revolve around real secret societies, and act as propaganda, to spread disinformation about their actual rites and ends and lull the public into complacency about them. If the Illuminati are aware of VC—and it's impossible to think they're not; surely, they follow him on Twitter!—maybe they're letting him continue in his work because forcing him into silence would just prove to his readers exactly how right he is.

Quibbles aside: I really do love reading The Vigilant Citizen. His posts are so well and carefully crafted that when I find myself getting convinced and/or creeped out by them, I'm forced to do my own research in order not to give myself apocalyptic nightmares. And since I am also someone whose training as an English major means I came out of 2012 certain it was a stealth Socialist text, and the vampire "thriller" Daybreakers impressed by its allegory on responsible resource management, I appreciate that VC respects the topics of his posts enough to subject them to rhetorical deconstruction.

Last week, several hours after the news of Alexander McQueen's suicide had hit the wires, VC tweeted, "His last creations were secret society/mind control/occult themed." So first of all, VC isn't finished scrutinizing Lady Gaga and all her known associates (McQueen having designed many of the costumes in the "Bad Romance" video). And second of all, maybe this means he's going to do a post soon on McQueen's work and death, and if he does, it will be a mesmerizing masterpiece of WTF, and will finally answer the question of what the collections of Alexander McQueen have in common with the Denver International Airport.

And you guys, seriously, what is up with the Denver International Airport?

Tara Ariano is the Managing Editor at Sling.com. She also co-anchors the podcast Overwhelming Positivity and has a personal blog that she rarely updates.

Originally posted by Tara Ariano from The Awl, on February 15, 2010 10:30 AM

Also celebrating its 25th anniversary this week: John Hughes' The Breakfast Club. Is it me, or does it seem like Meat is Murder totally predates it? Or is that just one of the signs of declining mental faculties? Because, Jesus Christ, I'm getting old.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on February 15, 2010 10:20 AM

Amber Albrecht is a Montreal print artist and illustrator, with ornate, fantastical flights of folk and magic. The images on her site are too small. She is the author of a forthcoming Petit Livre from Drawn & Quarterly.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: amber albrecht, magical realism, Montreal

Originally posted by Matt Forsythe from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on February 15, 2010 9:37 AM

Filed under: Jonny's Take, Diet & Weight Loss

Agave nectar syrup is basically high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as a health food.

Agave nectar is an amber-colored liquid that pours more easily than honey and is considerably sweeter than sugar. The health-food crowd loves it because it is gluten-free and suitable for vegan diets -- and, most especially, because it's low glycemic (we'll get to that in a moment). Largely because of its very low glycemic impact, Agave nectar is marketed as "diabetic friendly". What's not to like?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Agave nectar has a low-glycemic index for one reason only: It's largely made of fructose, which although it has a low-glycemic index, is now known to be a very damaging form of sugar when used as a sweetener. Agave nectar has the highest fructose content of any commercial sweetener (with the exception of pure liquid fructose).

All sugar -- from table sugar to high fructose corn syrup to honey -- contains some mixture of fructose and glucose. Table sugar is 50/50, HFCS is 55/45. Agave nectar is a whopping 90 percent fructose, almost -- but not quite -- twice as high as HFCS.

Fructose -- the sugar found naturally in fruit -- is perfectly fine when you get it from whole foods like apples (about 7 percent fructose). It comes with a host of vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. But when it's commercially extracted from fruit, concentrated and made into a sweetener, it exacts a considerable metabolic price.

Research shows that it's the fructose part of sweeteners that's the most dangerous. Fructose causes insulin resistance and significantly raises triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease). It also increases fat around the middle, which in turn puts you at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease and metabolic syndrome.

Fructose has also been linked to non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease. Rats given high fructose diets develop a number of undesirable metabolic abnormalities including elevated triglycerides, weight gain and extra abdominal fat.

In the agave plant, most of the sweetness comes from a particular kind of fructose called inulin that actually has some health benefits -- it's considered a fiber. But there's not much inulin left in the actual syrup. In the manufacturing process, enzymes are added to the inulin to break it down into digestible sugar (fructose), resulting in a syrup that has a fructose content that is at best 57 percent and, much more commonly, as high as 90 percent.

"It's almost all fructose, highly processed sugar with great marketing," Dr. Ingrid Kohlstadt, a fellow of the American College of Nutrition and an associate faculty member at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, told the Chicago Tribune. "Fructose interferes with healthy metabolism when (consumed) at higher doses," she said. "Many people have fructose intolerance like lactose intolerance. They get acne or worse diabetes symptoms even though their blood [sugar] is okay."

Agave nectar syrup is a triumph of marketing over science. True, it has a low-glycemic index, but so does gasoline -- that doesn't mean it's good for you.

If you simply must have some sweets once in a while, a small amount of agave nectar isn't going to kill you. Just don't buy into the idea that it's any better for you than plain old sugar or HFCS.

In some ways, it may even be slightly worse. For more cutting edge information on nutrition, weight loss and health visit Jonny's Web site.

Having second thoughts about your agave nectar intake? Read on to find out how low-fat contributed to the obesity epidemic.

Jonny Bowden, author, nutritionist and weight loss coach cuts through all the misconceptions about diet and fitness to help you transform your body, your health and your life.

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Originally posted by Jonny Bowden from That's Fit, on February 15, 2010 8:00 AM

Originally posted by Curtis from Hey Okay, on February 15, 2010 7:50 AM

"It's impossible that you have a million subscribers paying 50 bucks a year and it can't work," said Dave Eggers last Thursday, about the death of Gourmet, over at the Berkeley School of Journalism. Yes, that is actually impossible! And not so great that he keeps opining about the death of publishing with a complete lack of understanding how publishing works. Each issue of Gourmet actually brought in revenue of $1.18. A one-year subscription could be had at $15. The $50 a year figure is nonsense. And yet! He's right at heart, if not in fact. Gourmet made (and obviously spent!) a lot of money—they made $12 million in the third quarter of 2009, and made $14 million in the last three months of existence. But the way they made money was from a thing called advertising. Back in both 2006 and 2007, the magazine's fourth quarter income was around $45 million—also known as "boat loads of cash." But even in a bad ad market—could you or me or Dave Eggers put out Gourmet with revenue of "just" $52 million a year? Um, YES. And how! But then we are not a silly, misguided, over-spending magazine company. (Or are we.)

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on February 15, 2010 7:00 AM

Throughout New York Fashion Week, one of our favorite Brit chanteuses, Little Boots, aka Victoria Hesketh, will be blogging about her Fashion Week exploits, leading up to the March 2nd U.S. release of her full-length debut, Hands. She plays the Highline Ballroom on March 2nd and 3rd.

The weekend seems to have gone so quickly! Saturday found us all nursing the most harrowing of hangovers but we managed to drag ourselves to the Alexander Wang show. The first word that sprung to my mind was "epic," as the show was set in a huge hanger with more lights than I thought were possible. There were people everywhere, and it felt like forever before they actually managed to clear the runway and start the show.

If I'm being totally honest, my initial reaction to the show was a little confused, as pinstriped tailoring met lace, velvet and chunky knits with huge oversize sleeves and bare midriffs. I loved the feel of the show with the moody music and make up, and by the last few dresses (I  particularly had my eye on a red velvet and lace number with a definite nod to the '90s) all had become clear. Apparently Wang said the show was inspired by "women who make money and women who steal money," and the show definitely felt like a statement.

We missed out on parties that night and opted for a lovely dinner and some chilled drinks in Brooklyn which was a nice change from the bustle of the fashion pack and a good way to clear my head for studio the next day. Before I got started I managed to squeeze into the DKNY show, where I sat with model Poppy Delevigne and Mad Men actress Alison Brie who were both lovely. DKNY loaned me a great spangly jacket for the morning, which was a motif that came up throughout the show, mixed in geometric patterned dresses and trailing scarves. I loved the camel and burgundy coats, which looked so wearable and effortlessly stylish.  The shoes were incredible, with sky high studded brogue boots and huge box shaped bags to match. Again, there were lots of velvet and leather details, mixed up with cheeky plaid skirts and cute knitted caps. Although there were lots of classic elements, the show definitely felt very modern and free spirited, reinforced by a great soundtrack featuring new bands. I came away immediately wanting everything, which is always a good sign (although maybe not for my bank balance).

I was sad to miss the Peter Jensen show as I ended up working late, especially as I heard Nina Persson from The Cardigans performed! I am currently manically burning CDs for my DJ set later for the ELLE/ Bebe party on my last night in New York so will report back later...

Photos from PatrickMcMullan.com

Previously...
Introducing PAPERMAG's New Fashion Week Guest Blogger: Little Boots

CLICK HERE FOR PAPERMAG'S COMPLETE DOWN-LOW FASHION WEEK FALL 2010 COVERAGE. >>

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on February 15, 2010 6:44 AM

I don't read Spanish and the translation is a little rough in spots, but the gist of this article from the Spanish newspaper El País is that Ferran Adrià says that El Bulli will not be closing permanently and calls what was published on Friday by the NY Times "a misunderstanding".

In 2014 we will serve meals, but we will consider the format used and the booking system. But still two years of operation of El Bulli and four years to open the doors again.

Or perhaps the restaurant is moving to Austria? Or will become a McDonald's franchise? Who knows what El Bulli news tomorrow holds! Stay tuned. (thx, susan)

Update: Here's some clarification from The Guardian. The restaurant will cease to be a commercial enterprise and will instead be a non-profit foundation "similar to those that run museums and art centres".

Adrià has given himself two years to think about what the new foundation will do. "We are open to suggestions," he said. But he is absolutely sure it will involve cooking and serving food on El Bulli's hallowed premises.

(thx, iñigo)

Tags: elbulli   ferranadria   food   restaurants

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on February 15, 2010 5:11 AM

"When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because, in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for." [Minimal]

Originally posted by Kevin Purdy from Lifehacker, on February 15, 2010 2:30 AM

This video is a visualization of the OpenStreetMap community's response to the Haitian earthquake. Christopher Osborne explains: "In the video, each flash represents a new edit into OpenStreetMap, and this visualisation is a vivid picture of how much work was contributed by volunteers, following the quake. First the primary...

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on February 15, 2010 2:07 AM

Almost every web developer has a favorite database that he/she feels comfortable working with as all the tricks & gimmicks are already experienced.

It can be one of the popular databases below:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• MSSQL
• SQLite
• MS Access

or even simpler ones like XML, text, etc.

It is understandable why these databases are frequently used; they are well-documented, have a community behind them, integrated with most popular CMSs', easy-to-use, offered by most of the hosting companies ,etc..

But there are also many other databases which are getting popular day-by-day & may have advantages over what you're already using.

Here are 25+ open source alternative databases that you may consider using in your next project:

MongoDB

It is an open source, high-performance, scalable, schema-free & document-oriented (JSON-like data schemas) database.

There are ready to use drivers for most popular programming languages like PHP,Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, C++ + more.

Hypertable

Hypertable is a high performance distributed data storage system designed to support applications requiring maximum performance, scalability, and reliability.

It is modeled after Google's BigTable and mostly focuses on large-scale datasets.

Apache CouchDB

A document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript.

CouchDB offers a RESTful JSON API which can be accessed from any environment allowing HTTP requests

Neo4j

It is an embedded, disk-based, and fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than tables.

Neo4j offer a massive scalability. It can handle graphs of several billion nodes/relationships/properties on a single machine and can be scaled across multiple machines.

Riak

Riak is a very ideal database for web applications as it combines:

• a decentralized key-value store
• a flexible map/reduce engine
• a friendly HTTP/JSON query interface.

Oracle Berkeley DB

It is an embeddable database engine that provides developers with fast, reliable, local persistence with zero administration.

Oracle Berkeley DB is a library that links directly into your application & enables you to make simple function calls rather than sending messages to a remote server for a better performance.

Apache Cassandra

Cassandra is a highly scalable second-generation distributed database that is used by giants like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Cisco & more..

It aims to provide a consistent, fault-tolerant & highly available environment for storing data.

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

It is intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Firebird

Firebird is a relational database that can run on Linux, Windows & various UNIX platforms.

It offers high performance and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers.

Redis

Redis is an advanced fast key-value database written in C which can be used like memcached, in front of a traditional database, or on its own.

It has support for many programming languages & used by popular projects like GitHub or Engine Yard.

There is also a PHP client named Rediska for managing Redis databases.

HBase

HBase is a distributed & column-oriented store which can also be called as the Hadoop database.

The project aims to host very large tables like "billions of rows, millions of columns".

It has a  REST-ful web service gateway that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options.

Keyspace

It is a consistently replicated, fault-tolerant key-value store that works in Windows OS.

Keyspace offers high availability by masking server/network failures & appearing as a single, highly available service.

4store

4store is a database storage and query engine that holds RDF data.

It is written in ANSI C99, designed to run on UNIX-like systems & offers a high performance, scalable & stable platform.

MariaDB

MariaDB is a backward compatible, drop-in replacement branch of the MySQL® Database Server.

It includes all major open source storage engines + the Maria storage engine.

Drizzle

It is a fork of MySQL that focuses on being a reliable database optimized for Cloud and Net applications.

HyperSQL

It is a SQL relational database engine written in Java.

HyperSQL offers a small & fast database engine which has in-memory and disk-based tables, supports embedded/server modes.

Also, it has tools such as a command line SQL tool & GUI query apps.

MonetDB

MonetDB is a  database system for high-performance applications in data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, text & multimedia retrieval.

Others

• Gladius (PHP flat-file database)
• CloudStore
  
• OpenQM (multivalue database)
• ScarletDME (multivalue database)
• SmallSQL (Java Desktop SQL Database Engine)
• LucidDB
  
• HyperGraphDB (graph database)
• InfoGrid (graph database)
• Apache Derby
  
• hamsterdb
  
• H2 Database
  

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Originally posted by Umut M. from WebResourcesDepot, on February 14, 2010 10:00 PM

Now that's a great find. The Daily Swarm posts a bunch of Prince rehearsal videos from 1984. --MM

Originally posted by rex@fimoculous.com (Rex Sorgatz) from Fimoculous.com, on February 14, 2010 8:00 PM

I booked a flight to Austin for SXSW Interactive on Friday. Thanks to delays in planning and confirming my travel, I paid handsomely for the privilege: $674 for well-timed nonstop flights on JetBlue.

It didn't have to be so pricey. For $419, I could have flown on Continental Airlines instead. But Continental's booking system so frustrated me that I spent an extra $250 to fly another airline.

Some background: those who know me personally are aware that I don't much care for Continental. But I'm also not one to splurge needlessly, so when I found out Continental's EWR-AUS flight was a third cheaper than JetBlue's JFK-AUS route--at similar times, on bigger planes--I figured I'd give Continental another shot.

I used Continental's online reservations system to select my flights, then proceeded to the seat selector, which showed each flight at around 85% full. The return flight's seat map (click to zoom):

The situation was the same each way. The flight had 15 seats available. Continental had declared all of them Premium Seating, even several middle seats, which meant I couldn't sit in them. But the plane had no other seats available, which meant I'd be booking without a seat assignment.

More background: I've traveled enough to know that the guy with no seat assignment is the first to get bumped in case of overbooking. Continental had seats but wasn't offering them to me. Worse, Continental didn't have an alternative, just blocked, empty seats.

I understood Continental's desire to hold good seats for its good customers. I've had preferred status on and off in the past and I respect the privileges that come with frequent patronage. But with the rest of coach filled, I couldn't figure out why Continental wouldn't give me an empty seat and confirm my travel. Besides, the map confused me: is seat 7B really a top choice of elite frequent fliers?

So I called customer service for help. The friendly Southern woman who took my call confirmed what I was seeing: yes, there are premium seats available; no, you can't have them. I asked if I could pay extra to reserve those seats: no. I asked if I could get a seat assignment, any seat assignment, so I knew I would make it on the plane: no.

I eventually gave up my attempts to cajole customer service into helping me, and after a few hours of deliberation, I took my business elsewhere.

The user-experience takeaways here are twofold. One is pure information design: don't share information that's not actionable. All Continental achieved with the seating chart above was to drive me crazy, showing me that it had seats--some of them rather mediocre seats I'd typically avoid--that I couldn't reserve. Had they just shown them as unavailable, by having me log in with my (non-elite) OnePass account before selecting seats, I'd have been far less frustrated.

The other, of course, goes to the heart of customer service: sell your goods to shoppers who desire them. Continental lost my business because corporate policy dictates that the booking system has to be ready to accommodate a dozen Elite-status fliers who might want to fly between Newark and Austin on a pair of weekday flights that arrive close to midnight. Why not acknowledge the demand curve and give a paying customer the seat assignment he needs to book his flight?

Even better, why not implement a policy that generates both revenue and customer satisfaction? Many airlines charge for preferred seating. Continental could have levied a $100 fee on me for its premium seats, and I'd probably have paid it, because I'd still have saved money over my JetBlue option.

Instead, I'm back on JetBlue, where I'm willingly overpaying for peace of mind and a guaranteed seat. Oh, and satellite TV in a leather seat with good snacks. Happy jetting.

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog, on February 14, 2010 6:13 PM

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the addLib iPhone app this weekend. From the developer’s site:

addLib mixes the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio and the Facial Recognition System, and then creates graphic design. It seems the layout is made at random, but it comes from the rigorous calculated system. These theories have been made through the process that people has been trying to find new expression, and they are also the ways, to capture very ordinary “beauty” in nature, namely algorithm.

$1.99 well spent. More photos on Flickr.

Originally posted by Sarah Sosiak from sarah sosiak, on February 14, 2010 5:34 PM

In a stunning Editor's Note in Monday's editions, the NYT has acknowledged that business reporter Zachery Kouwe -- who joined the paper a little over a year ago from the New York Post -- lifted language from articles published the WSJ, Reuters and elsewhere for "a number of" news stories and blog posts.

The NYT says Kouwe "appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations....without attribution or acknowledgement."

The Editor's Note goes on to say that a followup investigation turned up "other cases of extensive overlap between passages in Mr. Kouwe’s articles and other news organizations’. " But the note doesn't specify those cases, or give the number of other similarities it has found so far.

"The matter remains under investigation by The Times," the Editor's Note concludes, "which will take appropriate action consistent with our standards to protect the integrity of our journalism."

It isn't clear what, if any action, the NYT has yet taken to punish Kouwe for the appropriations the NYT is acknowledging in this note.

We are contacting the NYT and Kouwe for comment, and will update as soon as we have more information.

Kouwe came to the NYT in the fall of 2008 from his position as mergers and acquisitions reporter at the Post, where he had worked the previous three years. Kouwe is a major contributor to the NYT's highly successful Deal Book blog, run by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Kouwe has covered, among other things, the Bernard Madoff ponzi scheme and various insider trading investigations.

According to Kouwe's biography on the NYT website, he got a B.A. in economics at Hamilton College, followed by a master's degree in journalism at the University of Colorado. He is originally from Tampa, Florida.

The NYT says it was alerted to Kouwe's apparent plagiarism by editors at the WSJ, who observed what it considered "extensive similarities between a Journal article, first published on The Journal’s Web site around 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 5, and a DealBook post published two hours later, as well as a related article published in The Times on Feb 6."

That story reported that other members of the Madoff family had agreed to freeze their assets in light of a pending victims' lawsuit. As of now, the story on the website doesn't indicate what parts of the story may have been lifted from the WSJ account.

Originally posted by THE NYTPICKER from the nytpicker, on February 14, 2010 5:32 PM

At 9:30pm on Sunday, September 21, 2008, Goldman Sachs was saved from imminent collapse by the announcement that the Federal Reserve would allow it to become a bank holding company – implying unfettered access to borrowing from the Fed and other forms of implicit government support, all of which subsequently proved most beneficial.  Officials allowed Goldman to make such an unprecedented conversion in the name of global financial stability.  (The blow-by-blow account is in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail; this is confirmed in all substantial detail by Hank Paulson’s memoir.)

We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November.  These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets.  When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

A single rogue trader can bring down a bank – remember the case of Barings.  But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.

Goldman will dismiss this as “business as usual” and, to be sure, a few phone calls around Washington will help ensure that Goldman’s primary supervisor – now the Fed – looks the other way.

But the affair is now out of Ben Bernanke’s hands, and quite far from people who are easily swayed by the White House.  It goes immediately to the European Commission, which has jurisdiction over eurozone budget issues.  Faced with enormous pressure from those eurozone countries now on the hook for saving Greece, the Commission will surely launch a special audit of Goldman and all its European clients.

This audit should focus on ten sets of questions.

1. Which eurozone governments have worked with Goldman, and on what basis, over the past decade?  All actions prior to and after the introduction of the euro need to be thoroughly reexamined.
2. What transactions has Goldman facilitated and how has that affected the reporting of European government debt?  (Under the Maastricht Treaty, eurozone government debt is not supposed to exceed 60 percent of GDP.) 
3. In the case of Greece, the accusation is that Goldman deliberately and in a premeditated manner conspired to hide the true degree of government debt.  Is this true, and to what extent has Goldman helped other countries engage in similar transactions, e.g., countries now seeking entry to the eurozone?
4. What is the full extent of Greek and other government liabilities, if these are accounted for properly?  Without this reckoning, it is impossible to design a proper level of European Union (or any other) support for weaker eurozone countries.
5. Are there non-eurozone countries that have also been aided and abetted by Goldman in this fashion?  For example, are the UK and Switzerland implicated – and thus endangered?
6. Has Goldman extolled the virtues of government debt in Greece, or other countries, while at the same time helping to deceive investors on the true risks inherent in those debts?  What were Goldman’s own holdings of these securities?
7. Is there evidence that Goldman has structured similar transactions for the private sector – enabling companies to conceal the level of their true indebtedness?  Have securities issued by such firms also been endorsed by Goldman to the buying public?
8. Were Goldman’s US-based supervisors aware of Goldman’s activities in Greece and other eurozone countries?  Did they condone activities that undermine the integrity of the European Union?
9. Where was the European Central Bank while all of this was happening?  Has the ECB become dangerously enraptured with the new Wall Street and its “techniques”?
10. Did any responsible official really think that what Goldman was constructing was really some sort of productivity-enhancing financial innovation – as opposed to a sophisticated form of scam?

The Federal Reserve must cooperate fully with this investigation.  Ordinarily, the Fed might be tempted to sit on useful information, but they can now feel themselves in Senator Bob Corker’s crosshairs.  Republican Senator Corker is willing to cooperate with Senator Dodd on financial sector reform, opening up the possibility of legislation that will pass the Senate, but he wants the Fed to lose its supervisory powers.  If the Fed refuses to help – willingly and fully - the European Commission with bringing Goldman to account, that will just strengthen the hand of Senator Corker and his allies.

If the Federal Reserve were an effective supervisor, it would have the political will sufficient to determine that Goldman Sachs has not been acting in accordance with its banking license.  But any meaningful action from this direction seems unlikely.

Instead, Goldman will probably be blacklisted from working with eurozone governments for the foreseeable future; as was the case with Salomon Brothers 20 years ago, Goldman may be on its way to be banned from some government securities markets altogether.  If it is to be allowed back into this arena, it will have to address the inherent conflicts of interest between advising a government on how to put (deceptive levels of) lipstick on a pig and cajoling investors into buying livestock at inflated prices.

And the US government, at the highest levels, has to ask a fundamental question: For how long does it wish to be intimately associated with Goldman Sachs and this kind of destabilizing action?  What is the priority here - a sustainable recovery and a viable financial system, or one particular set of investment bankers?

To preserve Goldman, on incredibly generous terms, in the name of saving the financial system was and is hard to defend – but that is where we are.  To allow the current government-backed (massive) Goldman to behave recklessly and with complete disregard to the basic tenets of international financial stability is utterly indefensible.

The credibility of the Federal Reserve, already at an all-time low, has just suffered another crippling blow; the ECB is also now in the line of fire.  Goldman Sachs has a lot to answer for.

By Simon Johnson

Originally posted by Simon Johnson from The Baseline Scenario, on February 14, 2010 4:22 PM

In retrospect, Sarah Silverman—queen of the rape joke—might not have been the best pick for the TED nerdfest. But now that all is said and done, Steve Case and Chris Anderson should back down before things get ugly.

Earlier today, TED Organizer and Wired EIC Chris Anderson called Silverman's talk "god-awful," which set off this exchange between Silverman and AOL founder Steve Case

Judging from Silverman's performance in The Aristocrats, this is going to get real filthy, real fast.

Originally posted by Adrian Chen from Gawker, on February 14, 2010 3:30 PM

Shared by Jake Dobkin
I don't know much about services like PubSubHubBub (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/), but couldn't a service like that be used to close the loop Matt is talking about? Basically every content post would contain a check-in address, and every service that uses the content would ping the check-in address with the location of the place where the content is being used. Then the content producer could visit those pages, or automatically include the feedback into the original post, using APIs. Sort of like a super-Trackback. I think if even just Twitter, Facebook, and Google adopted, that'd be enough— since most of the conversation is going on in those three services now.

Matt Haughey says Google Buzz doesn't offer an easy way for publishers to see what people are saying about their stuff. He's right; as in Google Reader and Facebook, much of the liking and commenting and sharing that goes on in Buzz happens out of earshot of the creator. I think Buzz is a fine product--a pretty predictable FriendFeed clone, really--but it does suffer from this same broken loop problem that Google Reader creates. Also of interest to other publishers, Matt's related piece on what feedback loops he pays attention to in order to learn how to make better stuff online.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Smarterware, on February 14, 2010 12:18 PM

Happy Day of the Third Century Christian Martyr Who Was Beaten With Clubs And Stones And Then Later Beheaded.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on February 14, 2010 11:09 AM

Published

Blog: Anil Dash
Entry: The Power of the Audience
Commenter: Fred
Email: 728201af5bc35bad394ea1bb7f490c137bd03725
URL:

for me a standing ovation is 300+ comments and 10k+ visits in one day. at least that's how i measure it right now.

curious what you think of Chatroulette Anil.

we seem to have similar taste. you told me kickstarter and foursquare were the two most interesting startups of 2009 and we agreed.

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Originally posted by Fred from Anil Dash Comments, on February 14, 2010 10:30 AM

Unfortunately, no. I think for me it would probably be a thousand naked men, and they’d probably be throwing olives. Either way though, it sounds like a fun dream!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on February 14, 2010 8:02 AM

In a very unique setting over Earth's colorful horizon, the silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour is featured in this photo by an Expedition 22 crew member on board the International Space Station, as the shuttle approached for its docking on Feb. 9 during the STS-130 mission. Image Credit: NASA -> You can download the full size (5349x4012!) image here. --> Giz

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on February 14, 2010 5:09 AM